No Ordinary Man: The Life and Times of Miguel de Cervantes Book

Sadly, Cervantes left no autobiography and few personal letters giving his side of events, so McCrory has to rely on court records, loan dunnings, pleas to the Spanish court and the long legal tangles of his extended family to reconstruct the world of Miguel de Cervantes, which saw the terminal decline of Spain amidst its imperial ventures. Cervantes' time in Spanish military service, including Lepanto, his defiant captivity in Algiers, the stint at tax collecting in preparation for the 1588 Armada, his independent sisters and their sexual relationships calculated to help family finances, the strained relationship with the Church, the shifting agriculture of the small town where Cervantes married into a shabby noble family, all of this should be riveting in the way other microhistory reconstructions have been, but McCrory is assembling, rather than reanimating, and the results were informative, but not inspiring or particularly thoughtful.