A Voyage Long and
Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America - Tony Horwitz
This nonfiction work blends popular history with travel
narrative.
Horwitz realizes that he does not know anything about the
French, Spanish and Portuguese exploring the New World in the 16th
century. So, to his credit, he reads a stack of books about their experience
and travels to spots like Dominican Republic and the Deep South of the United
States. Horwitz generally keeps things light, which is an achievement in light
of the grim abuse of indigenous people at the hands of the Europeans: epidemic
disease, genocidal violence, enslavement, mass rape and sexual slavery, etc.
Horwitz is a skilled writer, able to distill much
information is lucid prose, as he showed in Confederates in the Attic and Midnight
Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War.
Recommended
to people looking for popular history and the ‘in their footsteps’ type of
travel writing that had a vogue in the
1990s and 2000s.
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