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Title: Stay away
Review: William Manchester is an historian capable of excellent scholarship and astute analysis, but you wouldn't know it by reading this book.Manchester commits the all too frequent mistake of viewing history from the present backward rather than from the past forward. This leads him to make simplistic and erroneous statements about the "Medieval Mind," view the Rennaissance as being detached from the Middle Ages, and claim that the "voyages of discovery" created the modern world. The book reads more like a bad high school essay than a work by a distinguished historian and author.Indeed, aside from the first thirty pages, the book isn't even about the medieval period. In fact, much of it is not about the Rennaissance, either. The book, which he admits, is mostly about Ferdinand Magellan.So please, stay away from this book. There is nothing to learn from it, and it may give you a bad idea of the kind of historian William Manchester really is.
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