Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
Deciding to reread this book now, two years later, was definitely the right choice. This book is fabulous. A masterful, brilliant, authoritative -- suffused with a poetry and spirit of man (humanitas) -- treatment of the principle saliant of the 16th-17th cen. European experience.(This review was written close to 2 years ago; I finished the book at that time but, since the topic was basically new to me, I missed a lot -- and so I've decided I need to reread this one....)
This is, put simply, a magnificent book. Rich, detailed, insightful -- absolutely flawless in its scholarship, which is not at second-hand (as is, e.g., Jardine's) -- and humane.
The chapter on the economic background -- and the decline of Italy and the Mediterranean -- it is brief, but remarkably insightful. The chapter on ships is technical -- all about sails, jibs, lateens, caravels, galleons, and all sorts of other stuff I understand nothing about. Growing more confident about this book with every passing page, nonetheless...
After reading the opening two chapters, I can say that this seems to be a really masterful treatment... of a subject that I haven't read much about, admittedly. Written in 1963, the scholarship may well be out of date in places -- and the book was written before certain things became politically incorrect, which sometimes strikes the odd note. It is strange also to find Cortés and Spanish Counter-Reformation (Isabella and her Inquisition) described in terms of Renaissance ideas of the individual and of Machiavellian statecraft....