Items related to Columbus: Great Adventure
Describes Columbus' Europe, his skill as a sailor, his religious faith, and discusses how his "discoveries" changed the world
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Language Notes:
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian
From Kirkus Reviews:
Original Language: Italian
Vital and knowledgeable biography of the noted son of a Genoese weaver, distilled from a four-volume work (Cristoforo Colombo) by Taviani, president of the Italian Senate. In contrast to Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Columbus (p. 980), a real sense of the explorer's life as a fated adventure permeates this biography, beginning with Columbus's childhood in Genoa, the era's center of cartography and cosmography. As a teenager, Columbus smells the Orient for the first time on the Mediterranean island of Chios; shipwrecked after a bloody sea-battle in 1476, he takes the event in stride: ``The Lord our God miraculously sent me here so I could serve your highness....'' Taviani's asides are flavorful: Norsemen, he says, did not colonize North America because ``they did not find...potentates or lords whom they could massacre and whose goods they could seize''; Columbus falls in love in church because ``only in the half-light of a church could one stare at a nice girl without causing a scandal.'' (The girl is a full-blooded noble, well connected if impoverished.) The explorer's professional career and nautical genius are well detailed--endless voyages, endless accumulation of data and ideas, endless pursuit of honors. In the British isles, Columbus learns of the Norse discoveries; on the Atlantic, he learns about the trade winds, his knowledge of which established classic trade routes. When it's time to hustle, Columbus is canny and effective: Duke Don Luis de la Cerda Medicanelli sympathizes with ``Columbus's prudence and good sense...considering irrelevant any expenses deemed necessary, the more so as Columbus asked very little for himself.'' It's such a good deal that Ferdinand and Isabella take over, and Columbus plunges into the adventure that adds a hemisphere to the known world and introduces yaws--a ferocious new venereal disease--to Europe. A solid, well-written (and well-translated) account in which the man steps free of the research, complete with aspirations and appetites. (Ten full-color maps--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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- PublisherRandom House Value Publishing
- Publication date1994
- ISBN 10 0517131455
- ISBN 13 9780517131459
- BindingHardcover
- Rating
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