Reviews for The age of reconnaissance

The average rating for The age of reconnaissance based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-04-17 00:00:00 Joseph Dicresce 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 Written in 1963, the scholarship may well be out of date in places -- and the book was written before certain things became politically incorrect, which sometimes strikes the odd note.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....

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-30 00:00:00 Craig Nevius The book covers every aspect of exploration: the political and social background, the geographic and sailings, the bureaucracies of colonized areas and biographical sketches of explorers and my favorite, some geopolitical comments as well as the political theories underpinning and those criticizing the conquests. Loved parts II. and III. But Part I. was was a problem. Just like every historian dealing with exploration, he writes as if the reader were an expert sailor. I found myself checking the dictionary and photos for a better understanding far more often than I wanted to. For example, just within a just a pages I came across pintles, ratlines, "ship to tack," "brailing up the sail," bowges, bowlines, bonnets, ketch rig, barque, brig, brigantine, clinker-work, and mizen mast. I don't mind looking things up, but I think more of these terms should have been explained or accompanied by diagrams. I had similar problems with the astronomical terms related to navigation but I have no real excuse for that. I imagine when this book was written, many more educated people could read the skies than in the post GPS world. In any case, from my reading over the years, and regardless of my weak technical vocabulary, I'm pretty sure this is one of the most cited book on the explorations of the period.