Title: Plodding and conventional
Product review: The fascinating story of Magellan is not told with much style, intuition, or technical knowledge here. The author is quick to invoke a 21st century tut-tut whenever Magellan is not sufficiently sensitive to the natives, which must make him feel good, but adds nothing to our understanding of the time. Lots of digressions into fairly uninteresting matters fill out the book, apparently to conceal a lack of specific information on many of the events of the voyage. No original thoughts, research, or insights. No feel for the seaman's life, such as we might get from Patrick O'Brian or someone else with a solid understanding of the subject matter.
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