Title: Good Story Poorly Told
Review: What a missed opportunity! With the use of recently revealed material Shorto, with much publicity, presents us with what is billed as a new and exciting history of early Dutch settlement in America. The main problem is that it is not popular history, but historical fiction. In an effort to create a narrative story, Shorto informs us of dialogue, weather, the color of the sky, and specifics of peoples' clothes in specific circumstances throughout, information totally a creation of the author's imagination. One is tempted to say that the work is direly in need of an editor to clean up the mis-spellings, incorrect use of pronouns, clumsy repetitions, etc., but even that would not solve the main problem with this book: the author has taken new and fascinating information and made it boring.My only hope is that there is room for another effort to present this material to us, one which does justice to the material and our intelligence. This book does neither.
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