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Recent Reviews
Sathnam Sanghera
Rave Financial Times (UK) A staggering and distressing read ... The author asks for a nuanced dialogue that embraces the contradictions and paradoxes of empire ... Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/5b2dc64c-adf5-4711-995a-114c269805e6 This brave, painful, urgent and timely book, is not, in other words, about \"goodies\" or \"baddies\". It is about telling the truth about a nation’s imperial past in all its ambiguity — and creating dialogue between everyone who lays claim to Britishness.
Simon Schama
Rave The Guardian (UK) \"...extraordinary ... If these facts are sobering, the response of our politicians, described with measured fury by Schama, is terrifying: now as before, international cooperation founders as national tribalism belittles science and its \'cosmopolitan\' practitioners ... if societies are to fortify themselves for a zoonotic future they will need to rely on exiles and émigrés, cosmopolitan and liminal individuals, those benign \'foreign bodies\' Schama describes with such careful attention. There are, in fact, \'no foreigners, only familiars, only a single precious chain of connection that we snap at our utmost peril,\' he declares. In doing so, he makes an urgent case for building a better future on our toxic past.\
Sarah Dry
Mixed The Financial Times ... [Dry] is too shrewd to pin her arguments too closely to the current global climate emergency — yet [she] offers compelling evidence for the need to change our approach to the waters that made us ... Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to \'prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind\' is laudable, but seems unduly optimistic, acknowledging as she does that it remains difficult to see changes in climate and the oceans in the same way we can with the landscape. The water that surrounds us will continue to sustain us: but for how long?
David Abulafia
Positive The Financial Times If the story of this era leaves little room for new discoveries, the author is alive to the horrors of slavery and sectarian violence that accompanied the early European maritime encounters with African, Muslim and Amerindian societies in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The period post-1750 of joint stock companies, the age of empire and the rise of steam is crammed into the final 150 pages in something of a blur — but it suits Abulafia’s longer historical trajectory, which forgoes an easy Eurocentric approach. Still, it remains alive to some remarkable and forgotten elements ... This hardly does justice to the richness and phenomenal detail that drive The Boundless Sea.
Edward Wilson-Lee
Positive New Statesman ...rather like Hernando’s Life and Deeds of his father, Wilson-Lee’s book – the first modern biography of Hernando written in English – is far more than just a straight account of a life, albeit a rich one ... Wilson-Lee, however, manages to recapture something of the father through the son as he dissects Hernando’s accounts of their relationship and adventures ... Hernando’s was the first universal library, an attempt to collate and systemise all known knowledge, and Wilson-Lee revels in enumerating and sometimes getting lost in its contents ... not everything succeeds in this book ... What is particularly odd in a book that celebrates Hernando’s library is that its actual classification, organisation and display is only cursorily described in the penultimate chapter ... Nevertheless, Wilson-Lee does a fine job of capturing the intellectual excitement of a moment in European history when universal aspirations in the fields of learning and travel seemed boundless.
Mitchell Duneier
Rave The Wall Street Journal Mr. Duneier is pessimistic about the chances of any immediate political solution to the problem he calls the 'forgotten ghetto' in American cities. But his concerns are born from profound sociological and historical understanding. His book is an incisive, balanced yet commendably biting account of the unfinished history of the ghetto.