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Maybe someday
39
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
24/100Critics
6/100Scholars
88/100Author:
Caroline Dodds Pennock
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
January 24, 2023
We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the "Old World" encountered the "New", when Christopher Columbus "discovered" America in 1492. But, as Caroline Dodds Pennock shows, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others--enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders--the reverse was true: they discovered Europe.
What The Reviewers Say
... a work of historical recovery.
Determined not to be clouded by a white imperial perspective, Dodds Pennock tries hard to avoid the pitfalls of traditional 'explorer' narratives. That is to be applauded, but occasionally her overly righteous academic analysis pulls the reader too far from the experiences of her subjects. Her mission to change our perspective can also veer towards the moralistic, which is a shame, because the stories and lives she has unearthed are fascinating in themselves.
In principle all this sounds fascinating, and at its heart is a very imaginative premise. What undermines it, though, is that Dodds Pennock’s stories don’t go anywhere.
Unhelpfully, Caroline Dodds Pennock excludes indigenous people’s archives as a means of illuminating their feelings. She mistakenly supposes that ‘we rarely are able to hear indigenous voices’; but she is right in saying ‘it is easier to find documents about European attitudes to indigenous peoples than about indigenous attitudes to Europeans’.
