New World: An Epic of Colonial America from the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec

An epic of colonial America--from the founding of Jamestown to the fall of Quebec. This ambitious and extraordinary book challenges conventional historic narrative by presenting episodes in North America's history through the eyes and voices of Europeans who established the first colonial outposts here.

A curious and ambitious book that sets out to map the beginnings of colonial America, from the founding of Virginia, Quebec, and Massachusetts to the Anglo-French war of the mid-17th century. Quinn (Rhetoric/Univ. of California, Berkeley) tries to do this by utilizing the rhetorical conventions of each era and culture being described, the whole based on a kind of Virgilian master plan that would have this historical ``epic'' echo The Aeneid. The problem is that this approach conflates fine, straightforward storytelling with passages of overblown pseudo-epic ``poetry.'' Does Virgil really provide us with the metaphysical key to unlocking America's ``mythic, wilderness time''? No: The rhetoric of one literary form has simply been stitched onto the fabric of another. In any event, the ``voices'' of the different chapters aren't very distinct; a few quaint stylistic decorations do not amount to telling each story ``according to the literary conventions of the day.'' The point is, Quinn doesn't actually need Virgil or epic poetry. He is doing something different--Romantic history--and doing it quite well, at times brilliantly. His portrait of Frontenac, Louis XIV's governor of New France, is delicious, as are his accounts of Stuyvesant's New Amsterdam and its downfall, the ferocious Indian wars of the 1650s, the Jesuit saga, and the confrontation between megalomaniacal Sir William Berkeley and iconoclastic Nathaniel Bacon in infant Virginia. With all its faults, full-blooded rhetoric pouring from the text as it thunders along makes this a wonderful relief from the usual dryness of contemporary historians. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Echoing Virgil's elevated treatment of his country's founding ("I write of peoples and a struggle"), Quinn depicts colonizers and Indians up to Wolfe's and Montcalm's deaths in 1759, and the well-paced result defies pigeonholing. It is partly adventure tale, partly dramatic tragedy, and occasionally a tease (Quinn once quotes Dietrich Knickerbocker's satirical profile of New Amsterdam's Peter Stuyvesant--without fessing up that Dietrich was Washington Irving's pen name for spoofing popular history). Predominantly, though, Quinn engages rather than tricks, and his work is an uncommonly interesting sort of history in its own manner. Chiefly, he lets the principals speak through their memoirs: the Pilgrim chapter rests on founder William Bradford's gloomy reminiscences about the seeming religious failings of his colony; and the Jesuit missionaries relate their incredible travails in proselytizing the Hurons. Indeed, the power of religious motivation in colonization, as Quinn examines the attempted establishment of cities of God, jostles for attention with dramas of avarice and viciousness, making an all too human stew of characters with vaulting imaginations contesting for continental control; Quinn's effort will please a variety of tastes. Gilbert Taylor

Writing off the top of the best historical scholarship of the past 50 years, Quinn (rhetoric, Univ. of California, Berkeley) tells the story of John Smith, William Penn, Samuel de Champlain, John Winthrop, William Bradford, and others in lavish detail and epic sweep. When his writing is good, as in his depiction of the Jesuit fathers in the cruel climes of frigid Canada, his narrative is engrossing. Elsewhere, as in his portrayal of Puritan John Winthrop, Quinn overwrites, piling phrase upon phrase in a gorgeous exercise of pleonasm. Although Quinn's narratives are driven by the particular vision of 17th-and 18th-century white men, his stories are leavened by depictions of the annihilation of the Pequots, the tragic fall of Huronia, and the travails of the Acadians. In contrast to the usual drab historical study, this is a crazy quilt of a book, full of vivid colors and dramatic patterns, sure to please a general audience.
David B. Mattern, Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.