Ah, the familiar (albeit bloody) sport of reviewer-volleyball! The poor writer is given a faint hope of vindication by initial words of praise, little guessing that this is merely the reviewer setting his shot. Then, the niceties dispersed with, the author gets spiked right in his upturned face. Considering that Longinus was indulging in this syllogistic set-and-spike two thousand years ago, it may be safe to say the practice is as old as book-reviewing itself.   And it flourishes today. Take the August 22 & 29 double issue of the TLS Shadowboxer movies for instance. Amidst that issue’s many treasures (including a highly annotatable essay on book annotating by Adam Smyth and a fantastic piece by the always delightful Clive James on the redoubtable Joseph Horowitz’s new book) is one that comes with this old familiar booby-trap. Gabriel Paquette opens his review Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself ipod of Nicolás Wey Gómez’s The Tropics of Empire by calling it “erudite” and “laudably lucid,” but this is only the ball lifting from hand to head. The spike commences almost immediately.   Blazing Saddles dvd It’s minor at first. Paquette calls Tropics of Empire “underedited and frequently repetitive,” but the book is immense, so such qualifiers almost come with the territory. But the attempts at point-scoring being in earnest: “Columbus the sailor receives very little interest in The Tropics of Empire. Furthermore, the possible routes of this first voyage were limited by geopolitical factors, which receive only superficial attention.”

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Furthermore, indeed. As Open Letters freelancer Bartolomeo Piccolomini makes clear in his August review of the same book, neither of these assertions is true. Wey Gómez devotes quite a bit of space to Columbus the sailor and the politics of the routes he chose (one passage doing just that is quoted at length in the review). But Paquette is just getting started. He adds: “It is anachronistic, and misleading, to depict Columbus’ enterprise either as part of, or a sincere prelude to, a broader design to conquer and rule over vast tracts of the earth.”

This particular spike is delivered with such fervor that it lands squarely on Paquette’s side of the net. It’s mind-boggling that a trained historian could claim there was no “design to rule” in the planning of Columbus’s New World voyages. That those voyages were precisely so intended is not some innovative new construction of Wey Gómez’s. It was expressed by Columbus himself and expected by his royal backers. Wey Gómez takes it as a matter of course, as has every historian of Columbus since the man himself. Paquette’s point in claiming otherwise is one of the little mysteries of reviewer-volleyball.

I make no pretense of full neutrality here. In addition to being a ground-breaking scholar, Professor Wey Gómez is a friend of Open Letters. That friendship happened after our freelancer found The Tropics of Empire a thrilling and worthy book, not before, and it hardly matters in any case — historians who create a work as fresh and authoritative as this deserve better from the organs that review them. Professor Wey Gómez caught the TLS on a bad game-day; we’ll have to hope he fares better elsewhere.

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