Here are 100 books that Columbus fans have personally recommended if you like
Columbus.
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Like everybody else, I discovered Columbus as a child; I fully accepted the heroic figure that was presented to me in the 1970s. But by the time I received a PhD in Latin American History—in the very same year as the Quincentennial of Columbus’s First Voyage—I had learned how much more complicated was his life and the evolution of his posthumous reputation. For decades, as I wrote books and taught college classes on various topics adjacent to that of Columbus, I sought to make sense of the complicated cluster of stories that comprise what I call “Columbiana.” I am still enjoying that journey!
Wilson-Lee’s brilliant book is not strictly about Columbus, but about his youngest son Hernando Colón and the extraordinary library that he created in Seville.
However, it sheds much light on Columbus and his world. And (to paraphrase what I wrote when I listed this as one of my three “Favorite reads in 2023”), the book is not only a contribution to Columbus studies, but also an absolute pleasure to read.
It is erudite and scholarly, and Wilson-Lee shows a keen eye for fascinating digressions. Yet he also writes with wit and elegance, maintaining subtle narrative tension and effortlessly bringing the reader deep into the eccentric world of Hernando and his many books.
This impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming modern.
At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Colón sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Like everybody else, I discovered Columbus as a child; I fully accepted the heroic figure that was presented to me in the 1970s. But by the time I received a PhD in Latin American History—in the very same year as the Quincentennial of Columbus’s First Voyage—I had learned how much more complicated was his life and the evolution of his posthumous reputation. For decades, as I wrote books and taught college classes on various topics adjacent to that of Columbus, I sought to make sense of the complicated cluster of stories that comprise what I call “Columbiana.” I am still enjoying that journey!
Among the great many books that simply narrate the Columbus story, this one stands out for its engaging writing style and—above all—for its interweaving of the Columbus story into the parallel (and, Boyle argues, closely overlapping) stories of Cabot and Vespucci. I found it a fun and fascinating reading.
That said, I do think Boyle deploys his imagination a little too freely at times. Some of the old myths and misconceptions about Columbus are nestled in here as facts—which is very much part of the Columbus tradition—and Boyle even adds some new ones. And yet that use of speculation and imagination is central to what makes the book so enjoyable.
The untold story of the rivalries and alliances between Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and John Cabot during the Age of Exploration.
When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, the long-established trade routes to the East became treacherous and expensive, forcing merchants of all sorts to find new ways of obtaining and trading their goods. Enterprising young men took to the sea in search of new lands, new routes, new markets, and of course the possibility of glory and vast fortunes. Offering an original vision of the race to discover America, David Boyle reveals…
Like everybody else, I discovered Columbus as a child; I fully accepted the heroic figure that was presented to me in the 1970s. But by the time I received a PhD in Latin American History—in the very same year as the Quincentennial of Columbus’s First Voyage—I had learned how much more complicated was his life and the evolution of his posthumous reputation. For decades, as I wrote books and taught college classes on various topics adjacent to that of Columbus, I sought to make sense of the complicated cluster of stories that comprise what I call “Columbiana.” I am still enjoying that journey!
If I want to read a more recent narrative of the Four Voyages, without caring if its details are well-evidenced or drawn from Columbiana mythology, I’ll turn to a lively book like Lawrence Bergreen’s Columbus.
But for one that finds a middle ground between Bergreen and Fernández-Armesto, telling a good tale while also paying close attention to historical evidence, I turn to this book by the Phillipses.
I especially value and enjoy how the authors emphasize and explain Columbus’s contexts, bringing us along with Columbus into the worlds of Genoa, Portugal, Spain, and then the Caribbean. I also appreciate how hard the Phillipses try to avoid overtly condemning or defending Columbus in a general way—not an easy path to stay on!
When Columbus was born in the mid-fifteenth century, Europe was largely isolated from the rest of the Old World - Africa and Asia - and ignorant of the existence of the world of the Western Hemisphere. The voyages of Christopher Columbus opened a period of European exploration and empire building that breached the boundaries of those isolated worlds and changed the course of human history. This book describes the life and times of Christopher Columbus on the 500th aniversary of his first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492. Since ancient times, Europeans had dreamed of discovering new routes to…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
Like everybody else, I discovered Columbus as a child; I fully accepted the heroic figure that was presented to me in the 1970s. But by the time I received a PhD in Latin American History—in the very same year as the Quincentennial of Columbus’s First Voyage—I had learned how much more complicated was his life and the evolution of his posthumous reputation. For decades, as I wrote books and taught college classes on various topics adjacent to that of Columbus, I sought to make sense of the complicated cluster of stories that comprise what I call “Columbiana.” I am still enjoying that journey!
As my own book seeks to show, there are so many ways to approach the larger topic of Columbus and his worlds (or “Columbiana,” as I call it), and so many stories to tell that go beyond the well-known tale of his voyages. This book tells the story of the 1992 Quincentennial (or Quincentenary), crucial to understanding the relationship between the historical Columbus of five centuries earlier, and the controversial Columbus of today.
Although this is a scholarly book, and as such I found it impeccably researched and carefully written, I also thoroughly enjoyed its clear and engaging prose—spiced with dabs of dry wit. The twists and turns of the story are well introduced, as are the contrasts between how the Quincentennial is treated in different countries.
"An excellent book, lively and well written, and likely to appeal to a wider audience than the typical academic monograph."--William D. Phillips, Jr., author of The Worlds of Christopher Columbus
Sinking Columbus describes and analyzes the failure of the 1992 commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage from Spain to the New World, once "universally" hailed as the "discovery of America." Despite this failure, the book recognizes the Quincentenary as an important and illuminating event in the recent political and cultural history of the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
The authors draw upon their personal experiences as…
I lived in Peru for five years, working as a writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist and have travelled extensively in South America, voyaging 4,500 miles from the northern tip of the Andes down to the southern tip of Patagonia, lived with a recently-contacted tribe in the Upper Amazon, visited Maoist Shining Path “liberated zones” in Peru and later made a number of documentaries on the Amazon as well as have written a number of books. Historically, culturally and biologically, South America remains one of the most interesting places on Earth.
If you want to understand how both South America and the New World were “discovered” by Europeans, which had nearly the same effect on Native Americans that a meteor did on the dinosaurs, there’s no better way to understand it than to journey along on Columbus’ four voyages and be there when he and his crew set ashore. Columbus set foot on the northern part of South America on his third voyage, visiting the coast of what is now Venezuela. Bergreen’s book does an admirable job of introducing you to the man whose voyages would ultimately affect millions of people. This is the closest anyone will ever get to being on board as an entirely New World first hove into sight.
He knew nothing of celestial navigation or of the existence of the Pacific Ocean. He was a self-promoting and ambitious entrepreneur. His maps were a hybrid of fantasy and delusion. When he did make land, he enslaved the populace he found, encouraged genocide, and polluted relations between peoples. He ended his career in near lunacy.
But Columbus had one asset that made all the difference, an inborn sense of the sea, of wind and weather, and of selecting the optimal course to get from A to B. Laurence Bergreen's energetic and bracing book gives the whole Columbus and most importantly,…
Journeys of discovery are my favorite kind of story and my favorite vehicle for (mental) travel. From Gilgamesh to last week’s bestseller, they embody how we live and learn: we go somewhere, and something happens. We come home changed and tell the tale. The tales I love most take me where the learning is richest, perhaps to distant, exotic places—like Darwin’s Galapagos—perhaps deep into the interior of a completely original mind—like Henry Thoreau’s. I cannot live without such books. Amid the heartbreak of war, greed, disease, and all the rest, they remind me in a most essential way of humanity’s redemptive capacity for understanding and wonder.
I can’t stop going back to this book, which I have read in various translations under various titles. No book I know better documents the transformation of a human being. Abandoned, shipwrecked, and enslaved, Cabeza de Baca, a conquistador in the model of Cortez, begins a barefoot trek across the American Southwest as one kind of man and ends it as the opposite of the man who started out.
His memoir has the shape and structure of an adventure novel, and, truly, this narrative is where American literature begins. He leaves me in awe of his will to survive, his capacity for adaptation, and his compassion and love for the native world that he had come to the continent’s shores to subjugate.
This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author of "Castaways (Naufragios)", Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with Hernan Cortes. In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native people along the way, learning their languages and practices and serving them as a slave…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
Of all the books I have ever written, this one most allowed me to make it possible to see how the full story adds to the history we know – the vital importance of context. For example, that Cabot set sail just as Bristol was defending itself against the approaching rebel army led by Perkin Warbeck. Or that the Pope at the time, ruling over the church and the world, was the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. I loved researching it and I still feel part of it. My father lives in Spain, which helped enormously.
In 1507, the cartographer Martin Waldseemuller published a world map with a new continent on it which he called ‘America', after the explorer and navigator Amerigo Vespucci. The map was a huge success and when Mercator's 1538 world map extended the name to the northern hemisphere of the continent, the new name was secure, though Waldseemuller himself soon realised he had picked the wrong man. This is the story of how one side of the world came to be named not after its discoverer Christopher Columbus, but after his friend and rival. A fabulous historical detective story.
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 rogue and raconteur who counted Christopher Columbus among his friends and rivals; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor through 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…
For five years I hitchhiked round the world, for the most part in a kilt. I cycled 5000 miles behind the Iron Curtain before it fell and took a dog team across Alaska. I’ve sailed solo round Ireland and endured storms off Greenland. Currently, I’m cycling in stages from North Cape to Cape Town. Unconventional travel has been a part of my life for forty years. As a writer I try to inform and entertain, and my eye is drawn to quirky detail and humour. I’m inspired by wild places and the people who live in them: their customs and intrinsic wisdom. In particular I’m fascinated by the Far North and have travelled extensively throughout this region.
Nansen, ‘the father of polar exploration’ (and a great fan of Rae) was not just the first man to cross Greenland, to endure an intentional two-year drift towards the North Pole in an ice-locked ship and to turn skiing into a popular sport, but he was also a heartthrob diplomat, a founder of independent Norway, the first to introduce a tractor to Russia and a mediator in the enforced mass migrations of millions of displaced people. Did you know, for example, that while Robert Falcon Scott was discovering he’d been beaten to the Pole, his wife Kathleen was sharing a bed with Nansen in a Berlin hotel? The span of this book is immense and the fascination of its subject - an early sex symbol and media superstar - won’t disappoint.
Behind the great polar explorers of the early twentieth century - Amundsen, Shackleton, Scott in the South and Peary in the North - looms the spirit of Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), the mentor of them all. He was the father of modern polar exploration, the last act of territorial discovery before the leap into space began. Nansen was a prime illustration of Carlyle's dictum that 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men'. He was not merely a pioneer in the wildly diverse fields of oceanography and skiing, but one of the founders of neurology. A restless,…
I am an author specializing in nature, travel, and adventure writing. I’ve been fortunate to travel to many of the places featured in my books – including Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. I even to travelled to Morocco to study the art of storytelling with the last of the great storytellers. I’ve always been intrigued by stories that tell a personal journey about overcoming obstacles, especially if the story takes the reader to exotic places. So no wonder I jumped at the opportunity to co-author a book with a game ranger and conservationist in Africa that combines historical perspectives, larger-than-life characters, and dangerous experiences with wildlife.
I love nonfiction adventure books that immerse you in the details of an adventure while providing enough background information to understand the historical, cultural, and scientific perspectives of an era. In the mid-19th century, Paul du Chaillu spent years in Western Africa tracking down the njena, the mythical beast. This book makes for interesting reading as the author weaves the true-life adventure story of the discovery of the gorilla with Darwin’s evolutionary debate,and the challenges a Victorian-era scientist faced to prove his credibility.
In 1856, Paul Du Chaillu ventured into the African jungle in search of a mythic beast, the gorilla. After wild encounters with vicious cannibals, deadly snakes, and tribal kings, Du Chaillu emerged with 20 preserved gorilla skins—two of which were stuffed and brought on tour—and walked smack dab into the biggest scientific debate of the time: Darwin's theory of evolution. Quickly, Du Chaillu's trophies went from objects of wonder to key pieces in an all-out intellectual war. With a wide range of characters, including Abraham Lincoln, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.T Barnum, Thackeray, and of course, Charles Darwin, this is a…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I grew up on the Delaware River and took my first canoe trip around 12. Later, in my teens, I worked for a canoe outfitter. During college, I took several longer trips with friends. When a father, I would bring my kids and family along, often with a dog. Later, I would paddle the whole stretch of it, 200 miles from the headwaters to my boyhood home, which I wrote about in my book. To write it, I reread many of these books, including Powell and Graves, who also paddled with his dog. Mine, Sully, joined me on my 9-day trip.
Part scientific expedition, part adventure story, in 1869, the one-armed Civil War veteran descends into the Grand Canyon, the first Euro-American to do so. As the journey progresses down the Colorado and Powell and his men become more fatigued and hungry, his sense of the sublime increases.
Included are amazing wood engravings by artists such as Thomas Moran. Would be good paired with Brave the Wild River, by Melissa Sevigny, about two pioneering women botanists who made the journey in the 1930s to document the canyon’s plant species.
One of the great works of American exploration literature, this account of a scientific expedition forced to survive famine, attacks, mutiny, and some of the most dangerous rapids known to man remains as fresh and exciting today as it was in 1874.
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, recently ranked number four on Adventure magazine’s list of top 100 classics, is legendary pioneer John Wesley Powell’s first-person account of his crew’s unprecedented odyssey along the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon. A bold foray into the heart of the American West’s final frontier, the…
