Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America - Hardcover

Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400062810 ISBN 13: 9781400062812

Publisher: Random House, 2007

Synopsis

In 1507, European cartographers were struggling to redraw their maps of the world and to name the newly found lands of the Western Hemisphere. The name they settled on: America, after Amerigo Vespucci, an obscure Florentine explorer.

In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto answers the question “What’s in a name?” by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a sometime slaver and small-time jewel trader; a contemporary, confidant, and rival of Columbus; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor by dint of a series of disastrous failures and equally grand self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across the Atlantic of Columbus to the brave New World where fortune favored the bold.

Amerigo Vespucci emerges from these pages as an irresistible avatar for the age of exploration–and as a man of genuine achievement as a voyager and chronicler of discovery. A product of the Florentine Renaissance, Amerigo in many ways was like his native Florence at the turn of the sixteenth century: fast-paced, flashy, competitive, acquisitive, and violent. His ability to sell himself–evident now, 500 years later, as an entire hemisphere that he did not “discover” bears his name–was legendary. But as Fernández-Armesto ably demonstrates, there was indeed some fire to go with all the smoke: In addition to being a relentless salesman and possibly a ruthless appropriator of other people’s efforts, Amerigo was foremost a person of unique abilities, courage, and cunning. And now, in Amerigo, this mercurial and elusive figure finally has a biography to do full justice to both the man and his remarkable era.

“A dazzling new biography . . . an elegant tale.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An outstanding historian of Atlantic exploration, Fernández-Armesto delves into the oddities of cultural transmission that attached the name America to the continents discovered in the 1490s. Most know that it honors Amerigo Vespucci, whom the author introduces as an amazing Renaissance character independent of his name’s fame–and does Fernández-Armesto ever deliver.”
–Booklist (starred review)

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

From food to the spread of political ideas, the landmass from northern Canada to the southern tip of Argentina is complexly bound together, yet these connections are generally ignored. In this groundbreaking and vividly rendered work, leading historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tells, for the first time, the story of our hemisphere as a whole, showing why it is impossible to understand North, Central, and South America in isolation, and looking instead to the intricate and common forces that continue to shape the region.
With his trademark erudition, imagination, and thematic breadth, Fernandez-Armesto ranges over commerce, religion, agriculture, the environment, the slave trade, culture, and politics. He takes us from man's arrival in North America to the Colonial and Independence periods, to the "American Century" and beyond. For most of human history, the south dominated the north: as Fernandez-Armesto argues in his provocative conclusion, it might well again.
A panoramic yet richly textured story that embodies fresh ways of looking at cross-cultural exchange, conflict, and interaction, The Americas demolishes our traditional ways of looking at the hemisphere, putting in place a compelling and fruitful new vision.

"From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author:

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the Prince of Asturias Professor of History at Tufts University, is the author of several books, including The Americas, Millennium, Columbus, and Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food. He is the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Cairo Medal, the John Carter Brown Medal, and the Premio Nacional de Investigación of Spain’s Sociedad Geográfica Española. His work has appeared in twenty-four languages, and his journalism and broadcasts appear frequently in Spanish and British media.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1400062810
• ISBN 13: 9781400062812
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256