Volume 40, Number 3 · January 28, 1993
¡Adiós Columbus!
By Kenneth Maxwell
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World
by Carlos Fuentes
Houghton Mifflin, 399 pp., $35.00
New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery
by Anthony Grafton, with April Shelford, by Nancy Siraisi
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 282 pp., $29.95
The Times Atlas of World Exploration: 3,000 Years of Exploring, Explorers, and Mapmaking
edited by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
HarperCollins, 286 pp., $75.00
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900
by Alfred Crosby
Cambridge University Press, 368 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The Early Spanish Main
by Carl Ortwin Sauer, foreword by Anthony Pagden
University of California Press, 306 pp., $16.00 (paper)
The Native Population of the Americas in 1492
edited by William M. Denevan, foreword by W. George Lovell
University of Wisconsin Press, 353 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus
by Irving Rouse
Yale University Press, 211 pp., $25.00
Disease and Demography in the Americas
edited by John W. Verano, edited by Douglas H. Ubelaker
Smithsonian Institution Press, 294 pp., $62.00
Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci's Discovery of America
edited by Luciano Formisano, foreword by Garry Wills, translated by David Jacobson
Marsilio, 214 pp., $24.00
Portugal and the Discovery of America: Christopher Columbus and the Portuguese
by Alfredo Pinheiro Marques
Portuguese State Mint, 135 pp.
L'expansion Portugaise dans la littérature latine de la renaissance
by Luis de Matos
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 671 pp., 70,000 escudos
The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus
by Valerie I.J. Flint
Princeton University Press, 233 pp., $24.95
Isabel The Queen: Life and Times
by Peggy K. Liss
Oxford University Press, 398 pp., $30.00
The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History
by Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Longman, 324 pp., $13.25 (paper)
Columbus was mugged on the way to his own party. The American quincentennial year drew to a close with barely a mention of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and would-be 'Viceroy of India.' Even the advertising agencies found him too hot a potato (the potato of course being one of Europe's more useful American acquisitions resulting from Spain's conquests in the New World). By October Columbus had become what advertisers dislike most, especially when they are promoting department store sales on family holidays: he had become controversial.
Review, 8875 words
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