Columbus: And the Conquest of the Impossible

"My own book tries consciously not to be a traditional biography, which may not satisfy readers who want a straight narrative. So, for those people, I would say that Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s is the best. I’m a little biased, because I’ve known him since I was an undergraduate—he was a faculty member at Oxford when I was a student there—and he has influenced my thinking and my career ever since. I think he’s absolutely brilliant and very witty, and he has written dozens of brilliantly original books, including a series of books about Columbus. This is the best of those books. What really makes this biography stand out is that he questions all of the old assumptions and myths about Columbus. When he finds in previous biographies a statement that Columbus had a love affair with Queen Isabel, say, or that she pawned her jewels to pay for his voyage, or Columbus was secretly Jewish, or Columbus thought the world was round when nobody else did—the list goes on and on—he does not unquestioningly accept a single one. That’s really important, because there are other writers of good, very readable Columbus biographies by good historians who do. They see a story repeated over and over in previous books, and they just kind of swallow it as true. But Fernández-Armesto relentlessly questions all these little myths that have become enshrined in Columbus biographies."