A gifted historian presents a definitive book on Columbus—his life, his legacy, and the many controversies that outlived him.
Two thousand books have been written about Columbus, most of them spirited defenses or relentless attacks. Recently, the balance has shifted: the Genoese navigator, once considered a hero, is now blamed for bringing plunder and genocide to the Americas. In The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, historian Matthew Restall takes us beyond polemic, sifting through the evidence across nations, languages, and five centuries to explore the central questions of Columbiana. He demonstrates that we know a great deal about Columbus’s life, and what we know shows that Columbus was not nearly as remarkable as many have assumed—or as he himself believed. But his afterlives are another story: Restall narrates the international contest over Columbus’s bones and the dozens of regional and national claims on his birthplace (some turning him into a secret Jew), examines how he became an American hero and then a hero of Italian Americans, and more. The result is a kaleidoscopic account of a single man that becomes a new history of the modern world.
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Matthew Restall is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Anthropology and director of Latin American studies at Penn State University. He is the author of Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest and When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History, among other books.
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