the verge book review

Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf

REVIEW: The Verge, by Patrick Wyman

The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World , Patrick Wyman (Twelve, 2021).

This is a weird Substack featuring an eclectic selection of books, but one of our recurring interests is the Great Divergence : why and how did the otherwise perfectly normal people living in the northwestern corner of Eurasia managed to become overwhelmingly wealthier and more powerful than any other group in human history? We’ve covered a few theories about what’s behind it — not marrying your cousins , coal , the analytic mindset ( twice ) — but there are lots of others we’ve never touched, including geographic and thus political fragmentation, proximity to the New World, and even the Black Death. So this is also a book about the Great Divergence, but unlike many of the others it doesn’t offer One Weird Trick to explain things. Instead, Wyman approaches the period between 1490 and 1530 through nine people, each of whom exemplifies one of the many shifts in European society, and so paints a portrait of a changing world.

Of course, he does point to a common thread woven through many of the changes: culture. Or, more specifically, the institutions 1 surrounding money and credit that Europeans had spent the last few hundred years developing. But these weren’t themselves dispositive: after all, lots of people in lots of place at lots of times have been able to mobilize capital, and most of them don’t produce graphs that look like this . Really, the secret ingredient was — as Harold Macmillan said of the greatest challenge to his government — “events, dear boy, events.” 2 Europe between 1490 to 1530 saw an unusually large number of innovations and opportunities for large-scale, capital-intensive undertakings, and already had the economic institutions in place to take advantage of them. One disruption fed on the next in a mutually-reinforcing process of social, political, religious, economic, and technological change that (Wyman argues) set Europe on the path towards global dominance.

Some of Wyman’s characters — Columbus, Martin Luther, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V — are intensely familiar, but he presents them with verve, as interested in giving you a feel for the individual and their world as in conveying biographical detail. (This is an underrated goal in the writing of history, but really invaluable; the “Cross Section: View from…” chapters were always my favorite part of Jacques Barzun’s idiosyncratic doorstopper From Dawn to Decadence .) This is particularly welcome when it comes to the chapters featuring some lesser-known figures: you may have heard of Jakob Fugger, but unless you’re a Wimsey-level fan of incunabula you’re probably unfamiliar with Aldus Manutius. One-handed man-at-arms Götz von Berlichingen becomes our lens for the chapter about the Military Revolution not because he played a particularly significant role but because he wrote a memoir, and small-time English wool merchant John Heritage is notable pretty much solely because his account book happened to survive into the present. But even with the stories “everyone knows,” Wyman takes several large steps back in order to contextualize that common knowledge: for example, were you aware that while before 1492 Columbus didn’t take any particularly unusual voyages, he did take an unparalleled number and variety of them, making him one of the best-travelled Atlantic sailors of his day? Did you know that Isabella’s inheritance of the Castilian throne was far from certain ? 3

As the book continues, Wyman can reference the cultural and technological shifts he described in earlier chapters. For instance, much of the Fuggers’ wealth came in the form of silver from deep new mines in the Tyrol. Building the mines required substantial capital — for their new, deeper tunnels and the expensive pumps to drain them, as well as for the furnaces and workshops to separate the copper from the silver via the relatively inefficient liquation process — and while everyone knew all along that the metals were there, it took the combination of a continent-wide bullion shortage and a rising demand for copper to cast bronze cannon (look back to the chapters on state formation and the military!) to make it worth anyone’s while to get them out. But it wasn’t only the Fuggers who made their money in these new mines: the money for Martin Luther’s education came from his father’s small-scale copper mining concern in eastern Germany. Grammar school in his hometown, a parish school nearby, and then four years at university cost Luther pater enough that he couldn’t follow it up for his younger sons (and from his point of view the was probably squandered when Martin became a monk instead of the intended lawyer who would be an asset in the frequent mining disputes), but such an education for even one son would have been out of reach if not for the printed texts on grammar, philosophy and law that made it all far more affordable.

Of course, the relationship between Luther and printing goes both ways. While Luther’s very existence as an educated man was enabled by the printing press, it was the intellectual and religious ferment he would kick off that made printing work .

Wyman’s earlier chapter on Aldus Manutius ( fl . 1494-1515) makes very clear the serious issues that faced early printers: the average lifespan of a Venetian press founded between 1479 and 1490 was eighteen months. The vast majority were able to bring out only a single edition of a single book before they failed. Start-up expenses for a new press were enormous: the printing machine itself, of course, and the paper and the labor all cost money, but the greatest investment was the metal types, which costs thousands of ducats and took months or years to create. (For comparison, a well-off nobleman’s estates might bring in two hundred ducats a year .) And then, of course, you had to bet on your product: how many people wanted to buy your new edition of Caesar? There weren’t enough rich and educated men in Venice to justify a print run of 500, but if you began to expand to other cities, how far should you expand? Would someone in Augsburg or Cambridge or Lyon want a copy? Could you get it to them and get paid? The marginal cost of printing one additional book was more or less the cost of the paper, a tiny fraction of the total cost of your print run, but what if you produced 3000 copies and then discovered that a competitor in Danzig brought out the same text six months ago? What if you didn’t catch errors in the manuscript you used as a source, or the ship carrying your books went down, or your agent in Germany pocketed the profits?

Of course, printing still happened, and Aldus Manutius took risks: he created a whole new set of types in Greek and brought out first grammars and dictionaries, then beautiful editions Theocritus, Hesiod, Aristophanes, Aristotle, and more. Although Aldus himself was never a particularly impressive scholar, the Aldine Press made ancient Greek accessible to early modern Europe, so one could argue that he did more for the Renaissance 4 than any other single individual. But he didn’t do much for the economics of printing. That took the Reformation.

Aldus had, to some degree, been able to create his own market for Greek texts by introducing a reading public eager for classical learning to a new language. But he had nothing on Martin Luther, who wrote — and sold — forty-five works in 1518 and 1519. It started simply enough: Johann Tetzel, the Dominican preacher whose indulgence-selling campaign 5 had first roused Luther’s ire, wrote a reply to the Ninety-Five Theses , which was printed up (and then burned by an angry crowd). Luther wrote back a short, punchy text, the Sermon on Indulgences and Grace , in German this time to appeal to the public — and appeal it did, getting at least twelve editions across Leipzeig, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Basel, and Wittenberg. Tetzel replied, also in print and in German; Luther shot back; other opponents of reform began to pick up on some of the more radical interpretations of Luther’s arguments and Luther, needled, came out with increasingly extreme and vitriolic responses. And it all sold like gangbusters.

No one had realized there was such a market for vernacular arguments about church reform, but printers quickly realized that it would all sell — at enormous profits. Most of Luther’s works were short, eight pages or fewer, so they could be printed on a single sheet of paper in quarto format. This meant minimal up-front investment, no more months or years of setting and printing an entire volume before you could make money; anyone between major editions could make a few quick ducats by printing a Luther pamphlet. Of course, small print jobs like handbills, advertisements, and even those indulgences (which were also printed, though often on vellum) had often filled the space and coffers between major editions, but the demand for reform pamphlets dwarfed anything that had come before. The controversy of their contents heightened the appeal, and as Luther’s ideas spread in print defenders of the church published their own rejoinders. Again and again, Luther responded, pushed by his interlocutors and the popularity of his more extreme views into positions he would never have espoused on October 31, 1517, when he nailed his call for disputation to the door of the church in Wittenberg.

This should be a familiar dynamic to anyone who’s spent five minutes on Twitter: extreme and controversial statements get people’s attention, and if a platform or medium can make money off people’s attention then it’s in their interests to publicize extremism and controversy. Many of the printers were not themselves particularly invested in the question of church reform, but they knew what sold — and before long, it was radical advocates of violent revolution like Thomas “God instructs all the birds of the heavens to consume the flesh of princes” Müntzer, rather than boring old Martin Luther, who became the Main Characters of the press. 6 But printing thrived .

Wyman argues that his forty-year period was a critical juncture in world history, a series of sudden, discontinuous changes that fundamentally altered the subsequent course of events such that Europe’s eventual dominance, while far from certain, was at least imaginable by 1530 in a way it hadn’t been in 1490. The Thirty Years’ War, for instance, would never have happened without the Reformation (or lasted for thirty years without the tools of state finance developed during the Italian Wars ), but set the stage for the rise of the 18th century fiscal-military state, and so on. And while of course everything that happened in this period had its roots in what came before — a literate bourgeoisie is a prerequisite for the Reformation, &c. — things certainly did change very quickly! I’m not completely sold on critical junctures in general, but I’m not doctrinaire about my theories of historical change: sometimes events are very clearly determined by a single Great Man , and sometimes it’s all vast impersonal forces, so why not sometimes very slowly and then all at once? Which raises the interesting question of what other recent critical junctures have been, and how short they can be. “The Industrial Revolution” is a popular suggestion, but awfully broad; what about 1910-1920? Or…right now? If you’re in the middle of an all at once , can you tell? Or do you only know after the dust of a new world has settled?

But whatever your theory of historical change, Wyman’s approach to the era works extremely well, with each chapter describing one of a number of runaway processes that operated in parallel and mutually reinforced one another. Voyages of exploration, the rising state and the long-term debt used to finance it, the printing press, gunpowder warfare, the Reformation — each one fed into the others, to the point that his “point of view” characters are necessary less to humanize the topic they illustrate than to draw some kind of boundary around it. It’s an incredibly effective way of telling the story, not answering “why did the world change” but showing how . And while I do love books that trace the expanding ripples of one little pebble thrown into the millpond of time, 7 really, in the end, a broad picture of a changing world is going to be far more effective at actually getting your head around the incredibly complex reasons why things are the way they are. 8 Was it gunpowder or the printing press? Was it the discovery of America or continental trade networks? Was it the Reformation or the Renaissance? Well… yes .

Wyman glosses the term as “a shared understanding of the rules of a particular game…the systems, beliefs, norms and organizations that drive people to behave in particular way,” but it’s more or less what I’ve elsewhere called bundles of social technologies .

Apparently he may not have said this, but he should have so print the legend.

Isabella’s opponent, her half-niece Joanna, was married to King Afonso V of Portugal, so perhaps some degree of Iberian unification might still have followed. On the other hand, Afonso already had an adult son (King João II , widely admired as “the Perfect Prince” — Isabella always referred to him simply as el Hombre, “the Man”) who would have had no personal claim to Castile. Joanna and Afonso’s marriage was annulled on the perfectly true grounds of consanguinity — he was her uncle — after they lost the war, so they never had children, but if she had won perhaps João (who died without legitimate issue) could have been succeeded by a much younger half-Castilian half-brother. Certainly an Isabella relegated to Queen-Consort of Aragon would still have been a force to be reckoned with, but losing the knock-on effects of her reign (Columbus, Granada, the fate of the Sephardim , not to mention the eventual unification of most of Europe under Ferdinand and Isabella’s Habsburg grandson) makes all this a pretty good setup for an alternate history !

Even more fun: before she married Ferdinand of Aragon, there was discussion of Isabella’s betrothal to Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Yeah, that one .

Yes, yes, okay, the “Renaissance” is not actually a thing, but you know what I mean . Don’t @ me.

I was, however, very taken with Wyman’s passing remark that that although humanists did sometimes articulate a broad set of philosophical aims, they mostly “dove into the intense study and emulation of classical texts because they liked doing it [and] they were surrounded by other people who liked doing it” — because, yes, diving into the world of the ancients is fun , and part of the fun is that you’re diving into the same world that Aldus and Erasmus and Pico della Mirandola also dove into. It’s going to be very weird when the Vesuvius Challenge gives us classical texts that don’t have two thousand (or at least five hundred) years of scholarship and discussion around them.

The proceeds from the indulgences went to Prince-Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, who used them to pay back a loan he took from the Fuggers. See? It all connects. (As it happens, the Prince-Archbishop had taken the loan to bribe the Pope not to object to his election to the archbishopric, which was questionable since he was already Archbishop of Magdeburg and also only 23.)

The German Peasants’ War Müntzer helped kick off, the most widespread popular uprising before the French Revolution, killed hundreds of thousands. Incidentally, Götz von Berlichingen was briefly forced to lead some of the rebels.

The Domestic Revolution is my touchstone for this approach, but there are others.

As long as I’m citing old reviews, Akenfield actually does something similar, though obviously on a very different scale.

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• Consumer Affairs

Holiday Book Review: ‘The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance and Forty Years that Shook the World, 1490-1530,’ by Patrick Wyman

One of the great wonders of human history is how human knowledge in the Western Hemisphere failed to advance over a 1,000-year period from the fall of Rome, circa 476 A.D., until the Renaissance.  (To understand how stunning that fact is: imagine a world where in the year 3021, our descendants know no more than we do now.)

This subject was examined in the classic work The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, which documents in fascinating detail how for centuries knowledge was suppressed and the great works of Greek and Roman scientists and philosophers were lost to history.  (Spoiler alert: not the best millennium for those who believe in the virtue of the Catholic Church.)  At the end of that period, Europe trailed China and the Ottoman Empire in knowledge, and its prospects appeared bleak.  Greenblatt’s theory for why history swerved, with knowledge reborn, focused on Europe’s rediscovery of those ancient works and how they catalyzed a broader search for knowledge.

Still, turning around a thousand-year trend is no small thing, so I finished the book captivated by its story of the decline but unconvinced by the explanation for the rise.  A new book, The Verge:  Reformation, Renaissance and Forty Years that Shook the World, 1490-1530 , by historian Patrick Wyman, promised a more complete answer.  And that answer was quite a surprise.

Wyman notes a wide range of major developments at the cusp of the 16 th century – endless wars featuring more modern and lethal technology, global exploration, the Reformation, and the same spread of knowledge described in The Swerve.  He also describes a common theme, or catalyst: “What brought these disparate trends – things as varied as the spread of printing presses and the use of mercenary armies – together was a particular set of attitudes towards credit, debt, loans, and investment.  These attitudes governed how Europeans employed capital ….”  Thus, the pressing, even desperate need, for financing forced Europe to develop capital markets that fueled its growth for the next half-millennium. 

So, too, did a shortage of gold and silver coins, which had previously been the means of exchange for trade.  While the Great Bullion Famine constricted access to credit in the 14th and 15th centuries, Europeans benefited in the long run because they developed a sophisticated understanding of money and credit.  By the middle of the 16th century, Wyman writes, “Everybody, from the humblest day laborer to the king himself, employed credit and did so on a regular basis.”  Local bankers served local customers; bankers like the Medicis and Fuggers funded global trade.

The Verge brings history to life by telling the tales of the key (and fascinating) figures of this period, and how they financed their various enterprises.

Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of a moveable-type printing press was the major catalyst for the information revolution that became the Renaissance.  As Wyman describes:

More than ten million books, comprised [sic] of forty thousand different editions, rolled off the presses between 1450 and 1500.  Another fifty million – some hundred thousand editions – followed in the first half of the sixteenth century.  Even that first number, ten million, was probably more books than had been produced in the entire millennium prior to the invention of the printing press.  Print was a genuine agent of change, disseminating everything from the ancient classics to basic grammar to new languages to the wit of Erasmus to an increasingly vibrant and hungry reading public.

Of course noting the importance of the printing press is hardly new, but Wyman’s book describes what it took to manufacture and distribute those 10 million books.  The business of printing involved very high up-front fixed costs and high labor costs; furthermore, revenues were difficult to project, as it was very difficult to anticipate customer preferences outside of a printer’s own town.  Thus, as he notes:

Printing itself was a cutthroat industry.  Most early printers, Gutenberg included, would end up bankrupt or worse….  Far too often, printers flooded the market with more books than it could possibly absorb.  But investors kept pouring money into print shops everywhere from Westminster to Prague, and slowly but surely, printing established itself as a viable business.

Venice became the European center of printing not because Venetians were avid readers but because Venice was a commercial center with capital available to fund risky startups – the Silicon Valley of the 15 th century.

The growth of a printing industry had other ramifications.  Most people know one thing about Martin Luther:  that on Oct. 31, 1517, he nailed to the wall of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany, his Ninety-Five Theses , and walked away, triggering the Reformation.  The best part of The Verge is learning that doing so was only the first scene in Luther’s extraordinary drama.  To fuel the Reformation, and in particular to campaign against the system of indulgences administered by the Catholic Church, Martin Luther became one of the great booksellers of all time, in large part because he was one of the great marketers of all time.  He published hundreds of works, and not just in Latin (the language of the church) but also in German (the language of the people); he even added illustrations.  Wyman estimates that Luther sold half a million copies of his various texts over a three-year period — an astounding number given the relatively small population of Europe at the time.  While he began as an ascetic monk, Luther became a combination of Thomas Paine, Elon Musk and J.K. Rowling.

And then there was exploration.  We receive a detailed look at Christopher Columbus, who was a terrible person, an experienced and competent but not exceptional sailor — but an extraordinary fundraiser.  Of course we all know the story of how his angel investors Ferdinand and Isabella (also profiled in The Verge) provided key funding.  But, Wyman notes, “It is easy to tell the story of Atlantic expansion and exploration as one of royal initiative where the actions of figures like Vasco da Gama, Columbus, and their successors became stand-ins for royal actions….  For the Spanish, however, it is completely misleading.  The voyages were almost entirely privately financed, and the majority of the profits were pulled into the purses of the investors….”  Columbus initially traveled the world in search not of new trade routes and lands but of financing — from potentates, bankers, and wealthy people.  He would have understood Elizabeth Holmes.

And he needed to raise large sums because financing an overseas voyage came with extraordinary risk.  The ships could be lost or the voyage unproductive in generating profits (which in many cases meant enslaving people in the new lands and returning them to Europe).  Furthermore, the costs of financing a multi-month or multi-year voyage were extremely high and front-loaded.  As Wyman describes:  “In the end, the success of Columbus’s expedition came down to pens scratching figures in account books and shouted orders to clerks in cramped counting houses.  Commercial contracts and loan papers, handwritten bills of credit and indulgence letters rolling off printing presses by the thousands, conversations between powerful and wealthy people in the back rooms of palaces and richly appointed merchants’ houses.” 

So, how did the development of gunpowder warfare foster the development of robust capital markets (and vice versa)?  As Wyman describes, rulers of the 15 th and 16 th centuries were expected to fight wars, and the carnage was awful.  New weaponry and tactics “drove a massive, rapid increase in the scale, intensity, and cost of war,” as did increasing reliance on mercenaries as opposed to standing armies.  As a result, “[i]ncessant battlefield slaughter and grinding sieges created fertile ground for military entrepreneurship and innovation.  The riches of kings, emperors, and princes flowed into the pockets of recruiting captains, mercenary soldiers, cannon founders, armorers, suppliers, and the bankers who transferred the funds.”

The Ottoman Empire, in contrast to Europe, had an extraordinarily efficient system of taxation which funded its public sector, including its wars.  In the long run, though, “the fact that the Christian rulers of Western Europe had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for available funds gave them — and importantly their bankers — an increasingly sophisticated set of financial tools with which to operate.  By virtue of their sheer wealth and power, and their tendency to run surpluses, the Ottomans did not have to develop a permanent, interest-bearing state debt of the kind that revolutionized state finance in western Europe.”

We also learn about the Catholic Church’s system of selling indulgences — payment for the forgiveness and sin and admittance to heaven.  Its elimination was the exclusive focus of Luther’s early reform efforts.  But the indulgence system was not a hobby the Catholic Church could abandon under pressure; it was a huge cash engine used to fund the Church’s wars and exploration.  For an entity that couldn’t levy taxes, they were a necessary substitute.

In sum, The Verge is a fascinating look at the major developments and individuals that changed the course of European and therefore world history in the 16 th century, and the role that capitalism and finance played in all those changes.  Today, at a time when the world is retreating from globalism, banking and finance are perceived by many as innately wrong and unproductive endeavors, and Europe is bemoaning its dearth of capital markets, The Verge also reads as a cautionary tale.

The ‘Great Men of History’ Are Great at Getting You Killed

By Patrick Reis

Patrick Reis

The traditional telling of the medieval sack of Rome might go something like this: In 1527, Charles of Bourbon led his army in an assault on Pope Clement VII’s Rome, promising his soldiers that they’d be paid in the Eternal City’s plunder. Bourbon was killed in the assault, but the city fell, and the pope was held hostage for a sizable ransom. The event marked a shift in Europe’s balance of power that had repercussions for decades to come.

Now here’s how historian Patrick Wyman chronicles the sack in his new book, The Verge: “Shattering glass, breaking wood, crackling flames, and sporadic gunfire — and above it all, the piercing screams of fleeing citizens — filled the streets and alleyways as evening descended on Rome. The emperor’s army slaughtered indiscriminately while establishing control, killing the sick and infirm at the hospital of Santo Spirito along with a group of orphaned children. … Come evening, flames illuminated the city, throwing light onto scenes of horrific violence.”

The difference, in a nutshell, is that Wyman’s recounting includes the story of common people. He’s not here for the “great man theory,” which holds that the best way to understand the past is to track the exploits of its most powerful people, particularly in their conflicts with one another. It’s because of that theory that, for a lot of us U.S. students, the country’s history is taught largely as a relay race that starts with early European kings and emperors, moves to colonizers and Founding Fathers, and then continues onto U.S. presidents.

There’s the occasional digression into everyone else: women, low-wage workers, the enslaved, Native Americans and other first nations, and immigrants from all over the world. But these people — also known as 99.999999999999999999999 percent of all humans who’ve ever lived — are treated as a sideshow to the main event: powerful men leading wars against other powerful men.

That approach provides a woefully incomplete recounting of history, Wyman tells Rolling Stone. “I really think it’s important to understand the perspectives of common people and the experience of common people to the extent that that’s possible,” he says. “These are people like us, who were living, breathing, eating, dying — just like we do. We have to remember that the consequences those people suffer and deal with are every bit as much a part of the story.”

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Wyman is quick to note that he’s far from the only historian taking this approach, and that, at higher levels, trying to capture perspectives up and down the economic chain is “fairly standard philosophy of history stuff.” But Wyman has made a successful podcasting (his Tides of History podcast has covered subjects from post-Roman Europe to the paleolithic era) and writing career for himself by bringing that approach to a broad audience.

His new book, The Verge, focuses on the years 1490 to 1530. It’s a four-decade period that, Wyman explains, laid the groundwork for Western European nations — and later, the United States — to become the dominant players for the next 500 years. At the start of the period, Western Europe was largely a backwater, a collection of far-flung ministates that produced little in the way of goods anyone else wanted to buy. Those countries lagged far behind the Ottoman Empire or Imperial China or a host of other civilizations around the globe. But by the end of the period — thanks to a breathtaking series of technological changes, historical accidents, and decisions that were little understood at the time — these nations had laid the groundwork for dominating the globe.

This is not, however, a straightforward success story. Instead, Wyman tells much of the story of the transformation both through the eyes of the people who brought it about and from the perspective of people who lived with its consequences, including suffering among the common people of (at least) three continents.

Wyman spoke with Rolling Stone about how the modern world came together, how that formation was experienced differently, and how the “great man” approach isn’t just an incomplete way to understand history, but that it can be a profoundly dumb and damaging way of understanding the present. (Suffice to say, he got a bit fired up about the media fixating on billionaires flying phallic rockets — and ignoring the millions of workers who put them there.)

In your podcasts and in this book, you give a lot of focus to what daily life was like for the people of various historical eras. In some, you even create fictional composite characters to personalize the story for the audience. Why do you think that’s important? I don’t mean to say I’m the only person who’s ever thought about this, but I really think it’s important to, first, understand the perspectives of common people to the extent that that’s possible, and, second, to understand the experience of common people to the extent that that’s possible. So that’s why I try to spend a lot of time focusing on things like economic history and market mechanisms. Economic history has a certain democracy to it: pretty much everybody works, and it’s a unifying thread that ties people together in a way in which people have agency in the grand scheme of things.

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We have narratives of progress and things getting better and these grand ideas about the course of history. But history is still just regular people going about their lives. And their experience may bear very little resemblance to the actual lived experience of a person of that era. In fact, there are probably going to be people who suffer, whose lives get worse for those things to happen. I hope that there’s some of this in the book — this idea that we have to look beyond the agency of great people in order to understand the past. We have to understand that everybody’s got a role to play.

How can we apply that thinking to today? Where are we still falling into the “great man” trap? So I can give you a perfect parallel for this right now: It’s Jeff Bezos going to space . The “great man theory” of history says that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Bill Gates are single-handedly driving forward the human endeavor, that we should understand technological advancement, achievement, and anything good that’s going to come of that space race through the agency of those “great men,” with them as the driving force behind it.

I think the flip side to that story is what Bezos kind of ham-fistedly referred to , which is that Amazon’s employees and customers pay for him to go to space. By busting unions, by putting his warehouse workers through God-awful conditions, Bezos accumulated enough excess capital to go to space for a few minutes. So whose agency should we really be talking about here? Is it all of the Amazon workers who had to suffer and pee in bottles and work absurd hours in dangerous conditions to generate that excess surplus for Bezos? Or is it Bezos? Who gets to be the star of that story?

Let’s get a bit more specifically into your book. It tells the story of 40 years that changed the course of the next 500, particularly with the hard-to-foresee rise of a series of Western European states. Will you explain where things stood in 1490, when Western Europe seemed an extremely unlikely breeding ground for the next set of world powers? Western Europe wasn’t totally impoverished. There are some regions that were incredibly commercially sophisticated, densely populated, and quite wealthy. But there were only a few: The Low Countries (modern-day Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg), northern Italy, the Mediterranean coast of Catalonia. But the rest of Western Europe was pretty rural, it was a peasant-driven economy, and, generally, it was kind of a sideshow to the major centers of trade and, frankly, of innovation.

The places that you would really look [as seemingly the strongest candidates to dominate the centuries ahead] was the Ottoman Empire — the superpower of the day in that part of the world. There was also some parts of India that were quite commercially sophisticated and exceptionally wealthy. The Mughals there would set up an exceptionally wide-ranging and sophisticated empire. And then, of course, Ming China. You might also look at the Aztecs in the Americas, the Incas’ rising power in the Andes.

There are a lot of sophisticated, complex things that happened across the world, and Western Europe is not the global center in any meaningful way. If you would have said that a few hundred years from now you’re going to have several global empires that are based in Western Europe and that control the vast majority of the Earth’s surface, that would have looked crazy in 1490. By 1530, even if it was still a few centuries away, you can see how you get there.

So what happens from 1490 to 1530 to produce that shift? It’s a lot of trends coming together in roughly the same period of time. There’s also the process of state-building and the emergence of gunpowder warfare that is a huge trans-European phenomenon that takes place during this period. You have the Protestant reformation and everything that went along with that. You have the voyages of exploration — Columbus to the Americas, Vasco de Gama around the horn of Africa to India — that kick into another gear. And all of it is crammed into a few decades.

Why did those trends set the stage for a string of Western European empires? Was there something particular about those countries? So, I think necessity was the mother of invention. There was trade in Western Europe, but it was inter-regional. The area did not have a lot of goods to trade that the rest of the world wanted, so that’s why it’s Western Europeans going elsewhere to try to find these things, because at the time, there was a steady drain of gold and silver in order to buy things that Western European elites wanted.

So Western Europeans did find pretty creative ways of operating in what was effectively a time of monetary scarcity. That gave rise to a shared understanding of a financial system [of lending and borrowing] that’s broadly shared all the way from the richest bankers in Europe down to a peasant who shows up to the ale house and says, “I don’t have any coins right now, put this beer on my tab.” That financial system allowed money to get spent again and again and again, so any sort of new addition to the money supply had an outsize effect on the economy. Having this multiplier effect, I think, was one big difference between Western Europe and the rest of the world.

The Ottoman Empire would get huge windfalls of treasure, of conquest. But that money would come in, be disbursed, and become part of the treasuries. When you have a surplus, you don’t have to find more sophisticated ways of utilizing it. You can just spend the money you have. I think it’s largely accidental that you have really capital-intensive processes right at the time when Europeans happen to have figured out a variety of mechanisms for financing capital-intensive things.

Your book, right from its opening pages, makes it clear that viewing this only as a “success story” is a mistake. What were some of the negative consequences of this era? In the short run in Europe, it has a massively disruptive effect. It’s a new era in terms of the scale of warfare. The armies are getting much, much larger, and the destruction they bring is substantially great. A lot of people died in these wars. Take the voyages of exploration. After the first voyages showed promise, the financing system in place ensured that there would be more expeditions and larger ones. Columbus’ subsequent voyages found plenty of willing investors. Vasco de Gama’s fleet that sailed to India in 1497 was very small — only one ship made it back. But the next fleet was much larger. The next even larger, and the voyages became an annual thing.

But as the scale gets bigger, so do the consequences. The same financial system that made voyages of exploration possible also gave them a profit motive, and that profit motive meant they weren’t out there doing NASA stuff for the good of humankind. These were profit-driven enterprises, and that leads directly to enslavement, conquest, and all the other stuff we know is bad about the early stages of European colonialism. The investors wanted to get paid back, so if Columbus had to enslave the natives of Hispanola in order to keep his investors happy, that’s what was going to happen. If in order to pay for the cost of war, you had to let your mercenaries sack the city of Rome because you didn’t have the money to pay them, that’s what was going to happen. You get this cascading series of increasingly violent and large-scale things that happen across Europe and beyond, and it’s like a snowball rolling downhill.

Your book demonstrates that there are often clear trade-offs between human well-being and national development, as well as that there’s often a real conflict between a state’s drive for global power and the well-being of the people who live in it. There’s that great quote that politics is “how we distribute pain” throughout our society. And frankly, I’m glad I’m not the one making the decision of how much suffering right now is acceptable for the sake of a hypothetical better future. I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that we shouldn’t pretend that there are no costs and there are no consequences. And I think that’s the best I can do, to try to remind people that the decisions we make today have consequences, both intended and unintended.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. Wyman’s book The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World is available in bookstores now. His Fall of Rome and Tides of Histor y podcasts are available on multiple platforms.

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Book Review: The Verge

When was the modern world forged.

This is a book review of The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World by Patrick Wyman, with special mention to 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C Mann. If you like this you might like my review of Tom Holland’s Dominion , where I also discuss causality in history and Martin Luther.

In this Kvetch:

The Problem of Causality

Luther, ideas and new media

Why did poor, war-ridden Europe diverge from the rich, competent Ottoman Empire?

Selective moralising

History as selection bias

A fun PodcastBook

Deus enim et proficuum

For God and profit

1. The Verge

The history of Europe during the decades between 1490 to 1530 is, if nothing else, a rollicking read. Battles between European, North African and West Asian powers. Mounted knights, halberds and arquebuses, gems, cinnamon, exotic animals, slaves from across vast oceans. Princesses in towers and powdered unicorn horn, scheming palace intrigues and gruesome deaths for inbred rulers and their kin who sire as many illegitimate children as possible. The sack of Rome by disgruntled mercenaries, and the Knight Templars ensconced in their island fortress of Rhodes, “ a death trap designed to ensnare its besiegers, layer by layer, and bleed them dry .” Awesome!

It’s a busy period. Discovery of new worlds, religious turmoil, internecine European warfare, advances in military technology, new media and development of financial markets. Patrick Wyman weaves these complex strands into a visceral tapestry, noting the ways they converge and feed off each other. The press enabled the rise of Martin Luther, financial markets enabled the capital hungry press. Financial markets themselves arose from the need to fund wars and global expeditions which created labour markets for mercenaries and armies and brought back loot to fund the press and mining, which in turn funded more wars in an escalating spiral. Who could have known that the printing press would facilitate mass production of Church Indulgences (a kind of Pay-for-Pray scheme), a serious revenue stream that would be captured by rulers to enlarge and extend their wars?

Wyman paints this world through the eyes of ten famous as well as less know figures of the period. But he offers more than just their stories. As the sub-title indicates, he argues this is a unique period that seeded European technological, economic and military dominance for centuries to come in what would be called the Great Divergence — where Europe reached escape velocity and diverged from the fortunes of the rest of the world to carve out modernity. This claim is the centrepiece of these disparate threads. But this claim is not made out.

We do get vivid stories and wonderful details. Did you know that living standards and conspicuous consumption rose following the Black Plague? Or that aggressiveness was the hallmark of the Swiss? How things change. But sometimes it feels like a train of thought’s been cut off. Why did the Black Death result in a rise in living standards? We aren’t told. There’s no exposition of this remarkable aside (which seems awkward for modern immigration and population growth advocates). And so we’re not quite sure what to make of it it. This sense of incompleteness reoccurs.

Let’s take as an example a particularly vivid siege, the Ottoman conquest of Rhodes held by the Knights Templar:

When Suleiman arrived on the island on July 28, 1522, to command a force numbering somewhere north of one hundred thousand men, the sultan was immediately confronted by a series of formidable obstacles. Round towers laced with circular gunports jutted upward behind polygonal bulwarks; outer defensive towers connected to the towering main wall, which bristled with artillery and was as much as twelve meters thick in some places. Earthen ramparts placed in front of the more vulnerable stone structures soaked up the impact of incoming cannon fire. Angled bastions—yet another low structure projecting outward from the main wall—looked downward onto a wide, stone-faced ditch, which lay behind a second, wider, and still more inconvenient ditch fronted with an earthen bank called a glacis . Even if an attacking force managed to weather a hailstorm of cannon, gunfire, and crossbow bolts on their way to these ditches, they would still be staring upward at a series of high stone obstacles manned by experienced professional soldiers. Moreover, the four-kilometer course of the land walls flexed inward, allowing the projecting towers to provide flanking gun and cannon fire to any attackers unfortunate enough to have reached the main fortifications. The Hospitallers had turned their Rhodian fortress into a death trap designed to ensnare its besiegers, layer by layer, and bleed them dry. None of this was a mystery to Suleiman when he stepped foot on Rhodes’s rocky shores, accompanied by tens of thousands of soldiers and laborers and hundreds of ships and cannon. The sultan knew taking Rhodes would require time, resources, and countless lives. The Knights repelled assault after assault, repaired breach after breach in their mine-blasted walls, and weathered ceaseless bombardment from the Ottoman guns. Thousands of the sultan’s soldiers fell in fruitless attacks on the walls, each bloodier than the last. One last assault on November 30, carried out amid an apocalyptic rainstorm, left the waterlogged ditch full of dead Ottomans. The Knights had suffered just as dearly, however, and after a few more inconclusive clashes, they accepted the offer of surrender.

That’s it? I mean, we were set with an incredible scene and the description of the “death trap” is out of every 10 year old boy’s fantasy. Then the Knights just surrendered? We don’t have a sense at all for their motivations, their desperation, their objectives.

That said, the surrender and confrontation of the battle’s two opponents is one for the ages:

Villiers de l’Isle Adam, grand master of the order, strapped on his armor, picked eighteen of his finest knights, and walked out to meet the sultan. He kissed Suleiman’s hand, and the two men exchanged a long and poignant silence. “I am really distressed to have thrown that man out of his palace,” Suleiman later told his grand vizier. For his part, Villiers said of Suleiman, “He was a knight in the truest sense of the word.”

2. The Problem of Causality

The biggest issue with The Verge stems from its biggest claim: that within these forty years lay the seeds of modernity.

Let’s imagine history as a rope of interweaving strands. These strands might be political structures (clan, kingdom, nation state), credit systems, military technology, and so on. Each strand is long. Wyman slices through this rope and shows us ten strands at the 1490 to 1530 cross-section. He claims that this period is the beginning of something special.

Maybe? It’s impossible to tell, as each strand has a dramatically different path up to and from that point. Books have been written on every one of those strands and their fluctuations from the dawn of time. Providing a snapshot of that moment does not tell us about the periods before or after. Wyman implicitly acknowledges this when he devotes a mere paragraph tenuously linking the emergence of English traders and Continental financial houses to modern Wall Street. In some way that’s obviously true: the path to Wall Street went through those moments. But one could say the same for countless other moments in financial history. A similar story could likely be told about the Mongols a few centuries earlier, or back further to Rome, or countless other predecessors. Do we look upon modern America and point merely to the voyages of Columbus as its genesis? Or trace its creation back to its Anglo folkways? Or further back to the invention of deep-sea navigation? Or ship building? Or the wheel and the Yamnaya conquests of Europe?

Wyman uses Charles V as the lynchpin to tie together the various strands of history, and the inherent challenge in making a causal argument reaches its apotheosis here:

Charles’s emergence as the most powerful Christian ruler of the age was both inevitable and incredibly contingent, the result of decades of deep structural transformations and complete accidents of birth, death, legal minutiae, and mental illness. The emperor himself was both the spider at the center of the web of causality and the victim hopelessly entrapped within it. He was capable of everything and nothing, simultaneously all-powerful and completely impotent amid the unstoppable wave of ongoing events.

This appears in the final chapter in the book: for Wyman form precedes substance. It’s a nice way to wrap his stories, all these disparate strands, into an elegant bow. The author tries to have it both ways — Charles V is a cause and a result. And this is of course true — but only in the way that every moment is the result of every link in the chain of events that led up to it and the cause of every link thereafter. It’s a glib description of determinism and an elision of the difficult questions of historic causality.

3. Luther, ideas and new media

It’s very hard not to be sympathetic with Martin Luther, one of Wyman’s ten protagonists. In the land of an ultra-wealthy Papacy selling mass produced absolutions (Indulgences) and corrupt, game of thrones playing and openly licentious Popes, the Church makes for an easy villain. The line between saint and heretic is thin. A reformer could be burned alive or canonised. I’d read a book on the social, technological and theological dynamics that undergird that line alone.

How do modern Catholics look upon this period? How did Catholics maintain institutional longevity and legitimacy in this context? Do they consider these corrupt, licentious or murderous Popes aberrations? Something to do with the fallibility of man? Another book I’d read.

The meat of this chapter is devoted to Luther’s rise as enabled by the press. Today the printing press is often compared to the rise of social media. With the proliferation of Luther’s writing from zero to 500,000 pamphlets in two years it’s easy to see why. Luther found product market fit. Similar to the companies today that crest with each new wave of media: Zinga on Facebook, Away and Wayfair on Instagram, Youtube stars, Substack leaders. Luther’s talents converged with a new media and took off — he rode the white space. His descent was similarly rapid — and that’s exactly what you’d expect under this model. The channel saturated.

But what else caused the Lutheran uprising? How much was the conflict really about ideas? Are ideas really the right level of abstraction? What about leadership credibility and charisma? Economic interests? Military might? Wyman gives us a taste but no more.  

4. Why did poor, war-ridden Europe diverge from the rich, competent Ottoman Empire?

The Ottoman Empire of the period was a wealthy and dominant regional power whose reach extended to sacking the Italian and Spanish coasts, quelling the Persians and the Egyptian Mamluks and conquering the Hungarians. They even marched on Vienna where they were stopped in large part by bad weather.

One interesting difference between the Ottomans and their European rivals: they were an integrated player. They “owned” their warriors (often literally in the form of Janissary slaves) and controlled their canon foundries. European kings had to barter for mercenaries and weapons on open markets. Different regions specialised in different flavours of warrior: Swiss halberdiers, German landsknecht, Balkan cavalry.

One story you could tell is how this forced Europeans to develop markets to intermediate these powers. Financial markets, labour markets, and other hybrids (e.g. Wyman covers a fascinating array of contract mechanisms that arose by region and specialty). And this somehow led to Europe’s rise (that causal link is blurry). But it’s hard to avoid the benefits of hindsight here, working with a sample of one. If things had gone another way one could have told a story about how Ottoman financial and industry integration provided the advantage. Maybe both stories are wrong, and Europe’s rise is misattributed here altogether.

Wyman paints the Ottoman Empire’s strategic position as a kind of local maximum, a historic trap that left it leapfrogged by the European powers. But the why remains elusive. Is it the competitive rivalry between European states? Separation of State and Finance? We are given hints along the way — for example, the escalating feedback loop between canon power and defensive fortifications is a vivid example of how competition drives technological progress — but the discrete does not quite answer the general. Perhaps there is no easy answer to be found in early 16th century for why the Ottomans entered a period of multi-century decline. But that would undermine Wyman’s thesis.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Wyman about the period being a hinge in human history. But that’s because I’ve been left convinced by Charles Mann’s 1493 . Charles Mann narrows his aperture to 1492 and the discovery of the New World. So much so, in fact, that he wrote two books — 1491 and 1493 — documenting the world before and after the discovery of the Americas. His is an all-in case for the hinge status of that event:

After Columbus, ecosystems that had been separate for eons suddenly met and mixed in a process… [called] the Columbian Exchange. The exchange took corn (maize) to Africa and sweet potatoes to East Asia, horses and apples, to the Americas, and rhubarb and eucalyptus to Europe —and also swapped about a host of less-familiar organisms like insects, grasses, bacteria, and viruses. The creation of this ecological system helped Europe seize, for several vital centuries, the political initiative, which in turn shaped the contours of today’s world-spanning economic system, in its interlaced, omnipresent, barely comprehended splendor

The Columbian Exchange did not just lead to colourful examples of worlds colliding — like Japanese samurai and Basques in Mexico and a Scottish Panama. It led to an expanded trans-Atlantic slave trade where, in a cruel irony, blacks became the slave of choice for their ability to survive and work where English indentured servants and local indios died:

Tobacco brought malaria to Virginia, indirectly but ineluctably, and from there it went north, south, and west, until much of North America was in its grip. Sugarcane, another overseas import, similarly brought the disease into the Caribbean and Latin America, along with its companion, yellow fever. Because both diseases killed European workers in American tobacco and sugar plantations, colonists imported labor in the form of captive Africans —the human wing of the Columbian Exchange. In sum: ecological introductions shaped an economic exchange, which in turn had political consequences that have endured to the present.

It also brought the miracle of the potato:

Potatoes (and, again, maize) became to much of Europe what they were in the Andes—an ever-dependable staple, something eaten at every meal. Roughly 40 percent of the Irish ate no solid food other than potatoes; the figure was between 10 and 30 percent in the Netherlands, Belgium, Prussia, and perhaps Poland. Routine famine almost disappeared in potato country , a two-thousand-mile band that stretched from Ireland in the west to Russia’s Ural Mountains in the east. At long last, the continent could, with the arrival of the potato, produce its own dinner.

Did you know potato and milk together can sustain life? 1 The potato, along with the discovery of fertilizer in the form of Peruvian guano — seabird droppings deposited in large quantities in coastal areas which were shipped across the Atlantic — powered the rise of Europe:

Before the potato and maize, before intensive fertilization, 2 European living standards were roughly equivalent with those today in Cameroon and Bangladesh; they were below Bolivia or Zimbabwe. On average, European peasants ate less per day than hunting-and-gathering societies in Africa or the Amazon. Industrial monoculture with improved crops and high-intensity fertilizer allowed billions of people—Europe first, and then much of the rest of the world—to escape the Malthusian trap. Incredibly, living standards doubled or tripled worldwide even as the planet’s population climbed from fewer than 1 billion in 1700 to about 7 billion today.

It’s interesting how the form of each book supports or detracts from their respective theses. For Wyman, the form of ten stories just makes it harder to paint the period as causal. Why ten (e.g. where’s the potato)? And why that particular cross-section in time, when you can pull any of them back or forward? Whereas for Mann, it’s very clear: 1942, the Columbian exchange. That’s the answer, that’s the hinge.

1493 deserves its own review — it’s an outstanding book — but I use it here to show exactly what it means to demonstrate that an event or period was genuinely a hinge even or period, shaping everything that came after. It does what Wyman purported to do in The Verge.

6. Selective moralising

Wyman lapses into selective moralising just often enough to irk.

A cursory dismissal of Spanish conquests in the New World as a special kind of brutality is puzzling in a book that covers unending atrocities across Europe. Wyman singularly damns the Massacre of Cholula by Hernán Cortés and the sacking of the Incas and ransom and strangling of their emperor Atahualpa:

Cholulan blood funding the emperor’s European adventures… Treasures robbed from murdered Inca paid for the whole enormous expedition, blood money begetting yet more blood.

I mean, that’s not wrong . But it stands out in its emphasis. The Cholula massacre, which killed 3,000, was small compared to the other wars covered. And it was far from the most morally questionable event of the period, as panic-driven as it was. The Indian Ocean conquest by the Portuguese would have made a better example of European brutality outside of Europe. De Gama’s cold-blooded sinking of the merchant ship Miri, along with its unarmed merchants, women and children (and treasure), is blood curdling. As is the slaughter of every Muslim man, woman and child in Goa, which the Portuguese conqueror Albuquerque described as “a very find deed”. Why does Wyman single out for condemnation Cortés and Pizarro, savvy and vastly outnumbered conquerors in the Americas, amidst a Eurasian continent soaked in unceasing bloodshed? If the Inca money is blood money, what is the treasure looted and re-looted from across Europe? The Inca and Aztec empires who warred and slaughtered with the best of them do not need our condescension. Priests are being disembowelled and heads are impaled on stakes across Europe, man! That’s just the world it was. 

Similarly with Wyman’s description of Luther’s later years as an unfortunate and discrediting descent into bigotry and antisemitism. It’s annoying because it feels defensive and it’s unconvincing because it’s left as an aside with no case made for it. Who wasn’t an anti-Semite and bigot by modern standards? A line drawn from Luther to Prussia to Hitler would be interesting. But tsk ing at Luther’s anti-Semitism is glib.

The narrative fictional style Wyman likes to deploy and his occasional moralising can be less effective than careful detail, entrusting the reader to react for themselves.

7. History as selection bias

We’re reminded again that all of history might just be selection bias. (This is a central observation of Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness , which I reviewed here ). The uber-wealthy Fuggers, covered by Wyman, made it partly by betting it all on Charles V. How many dynastic houses were destroyed by backing the wrong horse? I’ve written before about the meteoric rise of central historic figures often being predicated on betting it all. It works until it doesn’t:

Hitler was the greatest gambler of all. Demand the Chancellorship — all in, WIN. Militarise the Rhineland — all in, WIN. Invade France — all in, WIN. Invade the USSR — all in… KABOOM! Game over.

8. A fun PodcastBook  

Wyman brings together strands of a complex, dynamic and emerging pre-modern Europe.

The shortcomings of The Verge in part stem from its format. Wyman’s fun historical podcast, Tides of History , covers many (all?) of the episodes in the book. It’s hard to shake the sense that the book was born a series of episodes and backfilled into a thesis.

The format hampered an attempt to deal with the meaty questions raised: technological progress, centralised vs decentralised governance, the features of European finance that distinguished its productivity from other times and places, the social structures that changed the political and economic power equilibria within Europe forever. The Verge provides a fun introduction to these subjects and overview of the period, but for deep answers you’ll probably need to go elsewhere.

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If you like this you might like my review of Tom Holland’s Dominion , where I also discuss causality in history and Martin Luther.

The economist Adam Smith, writing a few years after Young, was equally taken with the potato. He was impressed to see that the Irish remained exceptionally healthy despite eating little else: “The chairmen, porters, and coal-heavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution—the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions— are said to be, the greater part of them, from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root.” Today we know why: the potato can better sustain life than any other food when eaten as the sole item of diet. It has all essential nutrients except vitamins A and D, which can be supplied by milk; the diet of the Irish poor in Smith’s day consisted largely of potatoes and milk.

The story of agriculture is in large part a story of technology raising yields. Leaving fields fallow preceded crop rotation (in particular legumes, which raised yields) preceded animal husbandry preceded natural fertilizers preceded artificial fertilisers (not always in a straight line and with large regional differences around the world).

A little heretical perhaps, but one can’t help but wonder what the Jewish law of sh'mitah (leaving a filed fallow every 7 years) would look like if the revelations of the Torah happened a few thousand years later. God said thou shalt fertilize with bird sh*t out of South America or use the Haber–Bosch Process to create artificial fertilizer?

Also consider, as another aside, the irrigation methods of the pre-Spanish Mexicans via chinampas (from Energy and Civilization by Vaclac Smil):

The basin of Mexico had a succession of complex cultures, starting with the Teotihuacanos (100 BCE–850 CE), followed by the Toltecs (960–1168) and, since the early fourteenth century, by the Aztecs (Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325). There was a long transition from plant gathering and deer hunting to settled farming. Intensification of cropping through water regulation started early in the Teotihuacan era, and gradually evolved to such a degree that by the time of the Spanish conquest, at least one-third of the region’s population depended on water management for its food (Sanders, Parsons, and Santley 1979). Permanent canal irrigation around Teotihuacan was able to support about 100,000 people, but the most intensive cultivation in Mesoamerica relied on chinampas (Parsons 1976). These rectangular fields were raised up to between 1.5 and 1.8m above the shallow waters of the Texcoco, Xalco, and Xochimilco lakes. Excavated mud, crop residues, grasses, and water weeds were used in their construction. Their rich alluvial soils were cropped continuously, or with only a few months of rest, and their edges were reinforced with trees. Chinampas turned unproductive swamps into highyielding fields and gardens, and solved the problem of soil waterlogging. Accessibility by boats made for easy transportation of harvests to city markets. Chinampa cultivation provided an outstanding return on the invested labor, and the high benefit/cost ratio explains the frequency of the practice, which started as early as 100 BCE and reached its peak during the last decades of the Aztec rule.

Ready for more?

Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future, by Patrick Wyman

The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World

I wrote a book.

So…I wrote a thing.

I’ve been beating it to death for some time now, but my book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World , finally, officially comes out next Tuesday, July 20th.

It’s my first book, it’s been a long road to get here, and I’m pretty stoked about the whole thing. People I like and respect a great deal have said nice things about it:

So what is The Verge about, and why should you care? Read the first few pages and decide for yourself.

Put simply, The Verge is about a relatively brief but incredibly eventful period in the history of Europe, the decades between 1490 and 1530, and their role in laying the groundwork for Europe’s future role as the home of industrialization and global empires. The roots of those developments, I argue, can be found in the collision of incredibly disruptive processes at the beginning of the 16th century. Voyages of exploration, rising states, banking, gunpowder warfare, the printing press, the Reformation: all of these things tore the continent apart at the seams, while killing and immiserating untold numbers across the globe both then and in the centuries to come.

These things - exploration, states, printing presses, etc. - are usually understood as separate developments. I disagree: Finance linked them all together. All were expensive, capital-intensive processes that scaled exponentially as more money flowed into them, which it did in precisely this period. At the beginning of the 16th century, Europeans figured out that there was money to be made in long-distance sea voyages, financing rising states’ yen for gunpowder warfare, and investing in printing presses. The result was intense disruption in the short term and long-term shifts that eventually, many centuries down the road, led to European global hegemony.

These things can seem like impersonal, abstract processes, things that we discuss in grand terms over the span of decades and centuries. But they were real and tangible, and real people were involved in them, drove them forward, and suffered as a result. To avoid this depersonalization, I’ve told the story of this period through the lives of a series of historical figures. Some of them, like Christopher Columbus, Queen Isabella of Castile, and the banker Jakob Fugger, you might have heard of; others, like the one-armed German mercenary Goetz von Berlichingen, are a bit more obscure, but no less illustrative.

My hope is that I’ve written an entertaining book that nevertheless engages with the latest scholarship on this period while addressing a big, important question about the history of the last half millennium.

The Verge comes out on Tuesday, but you can preorder it now on the platform of your choice. I read the audiobook, which will be available on Audible and everywhere else you get your audiobooks; it was a cool experience, especially because the booth where I did it was exactly where Lil Wayne recorded much of Tha Carter III . If you’ve already preordered the book, thank you for the support!

(Perspectives will return to not-book-related-content shortly.)

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The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World The creator of the hit podcast series  Tides of History  and  Fall of Rome  explores the four explosive decades between 1490 and 1530, bringing to life the dramatic and deeply human story of how the West was reborn. In the bestselling tradition of  The Swerve  and  A Distant Mirror ,  The Verge  tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Here, author Patrick Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of printed mass media, extreme taxation, exploitative globalization, humanistic learning, gunpowder warfare, and mass religious conflict in the long term, and their intensely disruptive consequences in the short-term. As told through the lives of ten real people—from famous figures like Christopher Columbus and wealthy banker Jakob Fugger to a ruthless small-time merchant and a one-armed mercenary captain— The Verge  illustrates how their lives, and the times in which they lived, set the stage for an unprecedented globalized future. Over an intense forty-year period, the seeds for the so-called "Great Divergence" between Western Europe and the rest of the globe would be planted. From Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic to Martin Luther's sparking the Protestant Reformation, the foundations of our own, recognizably modern world came into being. For the past 500 years, historians, economists, and the policy-oriented have argued which of these individual developments best explains the West's rise from backwater periphery to global dominance. As  The Verge  presents it, however, the answer is far more nuanced. There are no customer reviews for this item yet. Classic Totes Tote bags and pouches in a variety of styles, sizes, and designs , plus mugs, bookmarks, and more! Shipping & Pickup We ship anywhere in the U.S. and orders of $75+ ship free via media mail! Noteworthy Signed Books: Join the Club! Join our Signed First Edition Club (or give a gift subscription) for a signed book of great literary merit, delivered to you monthly. Harvard Square's Independent Bookstore © 2024 Harvard Book Store All rights reserved Contact Harvard Book Store 1256 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel (617) 661-1515 Toll Free (800) 542-READ Email [email protected] View our current hours » Join our bookselling team » We plan to remain closed to the public for two weeks, through Saturday, March 28 While our doors are closed, we plan to staff our phones, email, and harvard.com web order services from 10am to 6pm daily. Store Hours Monday - Saturday: 9am - 11pm Sunday: 10am - 10pm Holiday Hours 12/24: 9am - 7pm 12/25: closed 12/31: 9am - 9pm 1/1: 12pm - 11pm All other hours as usual. Map Find Harvard Book Store » Online Customer Service Shipping » Online Returns » Privacy Policy » Harvard University harvard.edu » Clubs & Services Find anything you save across the site in your account Briefly Noted Lincoln on the Verge , by Ted Widmer (Simon & Schuster) . In February, 1861, crowds in eight states greeted the train carrying Abraham Lincoln, as President-elect, from Springfield, Illinois, to the nation’s deeply divided capital. In an account of some hundred speeches and countless handshakes that occurred along the way, Widmer, a former White House speechwriter, traces Lincoln’s rapid growth as a statesman. The train draws “wild multitudes” both in towns “awakened” to the antislavery cause and in those whose allegiance is uncertain, and Lincoln is shown ably working the press to rally support. Widmer portrays a politician who has a populist touch but exercises this power responsibly, achieving what Frederick Douglass later called “wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them.” The Shapeless Unease , by Samantha Harvey (Grove) . This experimental memoir of a year plagued by insomnia moves between vivid descriptions of sleepless nights and meditations on consciousness, death, and the nature of time. Harvey captures the gravity of her affliction (“I go up to bed at night, I get beaten up, I come downstairs in the morning”), while also maintaining levity and grace. Sometimes she watches Netflix, half dreaming about what she sees; at other times her eddying mind bumps into ideas about the universe (“Everything is made up of space and is more space than it is form”). Her forays offer an engrossing vision of how our lives are knit together—day to day, night to night, and thought to thought. A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth , by Daniel Mason (Little, Brown) . The characters in these robust short stories, set mostly in the nineteenth century, struggle as captains of their destinies. A doctor increasingly believes his body to be inhabited by an “imposter”; a Frenchwoman takes a hot-air balloon to new heights, hoping to find “a tear in the very fabric of the heavens.” In the only story that takes place in present-day America, the narrator remembers an uncle, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who became a fan of Civil War reënactments and of WrestleMania—confrontations with predetermined outcomes. “I wonder whether there was something about the cartoon violence that served as a parody of all violence, and perhaps as a catharsis for the real kind that he’d seen,” the narrator writes. Clean Hands , by Patrick Hoffman (Atlantic Monthly) . This sly thriller begins during rush hour at Grand Central Terminal, when a junior associate at a law firm is pickpocketed and his phone, full of incriminating documents about a major bank, is passed through a chain of petty criminals. A blackmailer gets hold of the documents and the law firm, in the hope of tracking the phone, hires Valencia Walker, a former C.I.A. officer, who marshals a seemingly inexhaustible network of ex-military and law-enforcement types. The plot is fast-paced, and its twists—Walker’s motivations are as suspect as everyone else’s—lead ever deeper into corporate intrigue and government espionage. Books & Fiction By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Skip to main content Keyboard shortcuts for audio player Book Reviews The stories in 'verge' are beautiful, but don't quite satisfy. Kamil Ahsan Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How? Independent Bookstores In reference to the sexless characters of her novel The Book of Joan , Lidia Yuknavitch once said that she didn't get rid of gender, but instead "flattened it out ... in a way that helped me focus a question." That worked for The Book of Joan . For Yuknavitch's new story collection Verge , it mostly doesn't. Verge is inhabited by people at the limits of society. A former addict invites an addict and street-walker into her presumably middle-class home in "Street Walker." A swimmer escaping a war-torn country swims a capsizing raft with her sister across the Aegean Sea in "The Pull." An Eastern European orphan who's lost a hand is trained for a new job as a black market organ-runner. And that's just the first three stories. There's a strange quality to Yuknavitch's stories, contradictions that rub up against each other. The stories are indeed strange, but the strangeness can become formulaic. Usually they begin with an off-kilter description of the protagonist. A girl understands herself "as a body inside out'" whose "blue veins standing out in her neck and at her temples made her look eerily like a map of Siberia." Then there's an overly-metaphorical central mystery meant to describe the protagonist's plight — this particular girl is a trafficked Eastern European prostitute in Portland. Finally, the story culminates, either in a series of charming turns of phrases or a last-minute twist — in this case, it's the former. "There is something from spine and ice that has yet to form a language ... one those bought-and-sold Eastern European girls are learning besides English: They are learning to gut themselves open so that others will run." It all makes for some beautiful sentences, and also some deeply unsatisfying stories. 'The Book Of Joan' Is A Dizzying, Dystopian Genre Mashup Author Interviews 'the book of joan' recasts a historic heroine — in space. Part of this is because Yuknavitch's use of metaphor is often far too on-the-nose, leaving one scratching one's head as to what "incarcerated rivers" are meant to connote. A woman waits at a drive through and is paralyzed by the prospect of a panhandler coming up to her window. She receives her food and sees "capitalism and youth emerging from the window." What does it mean for capitalism to emerge from a window? Does capitalism even need to emerge out of a window for the reader to understand that the story is about inequality? A story of the unhappy woman whose lover is a "white male genius artist in San Francisco" is replete with the countless ways the woman feels her particular presence does not matter. The story is titled "A Woman Object (Exploding)." Scratch off some character details and it seems a bit like every other story has the same protagonist. Too often, Verge often provides a universalizing way of thinking of, say, class or gender by presenting a view of inequality and womanhood so monolithic and flattened that it wards off a reader's investment. It is an uncertain collection. Some stories are wonderful, but most require more narrative space. "Cosmos," for instance, is about a cleaner at a planetarium who fashions the teenage customers' trash into a tiny city on his dining table. Constructing his tableau, he begins to see through the teenagers what the future could look like. "It all made perfect sense to him: These beings left traces of themselves in the objects they left behind, they represented of a new order of existence." One morning, the cleaner discovers a severed arm under a seat, and his sense of life itself falls into crisis: "He saw that his superficial efforts with refuse were the key, that decay itself was the giver of life ... He'd simply mistaken the act for the thing itself." "Cosmos" is evocative of Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. where the protagonist falls into sensory collapse after killing a cockroach. The only issue with "Cosmos" is that it is too short. Elsewhere, Yuknavitch evokes two French writers with hypnotic and unflinching regard. A story of a girl growing up near a new prison is as bold about sexuality, addiction and even depravity as Leila Slimani's Adele . Another, about a girl inseminating her sister through an incestuous ritual, is depicted with as much ferocious commitment as Anne Serre's in The Governesses. When Verge presents womanhood by not taking the obvious path of contrasting women's actions with male agency, it is deeply insightful and riveting. But one story towers above it all: "How to Lose an I," a story about a man adjusting to life after losing an eye in a tragic accident. It is here that Yuknavitch's gifts pay off in spades: for even in her most disappointing moments, she knows how to capture perception . "He is driving," she writes, "and California has a smell, orange trees and asphalt ... He is driving and memory moves his sight, his hearing, his heart beating." Unlike many of the other stories, here every single word is imperative. It is with "How to Lose an I" that Yuknavitch's prose soars, expertly drawing the narrator's adjustment to life into a detailed exploration of the subjectivity of the self. There's no sense of flattening. The story reads like dispassionate journalism or detailed ethnography: like something focused. If only there were more like it. Kamil Ahsan is a biologist, historian and writer based in New Haven. He is an editor at Barrelhouse and his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Prospect, Salon and Chicago Review . ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN LINCOLN ON THE VERGE Thirteen days to washington. by Ted Widmer ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020 A colorful, richly detailed overture to Lincoln’s odyssey. On Feb. 11, 1861, three weeks before his inauguration, President-Elect Abraham Lincoln boarded a train for Washington, D.C. This lively account describes that eventful journey. “Lincoln’s safe delivery,” writes Widmer, “would become, over the next thirteen days, a powerful symbol for the survival of democracy in America. As he traveled his circuitous route, Lincoln carried the aspirations of millions on his shoulders. Around the country, they were waiting for him.” No one doubted the occasion’s historical significance, so the train overflowed with reporters, officials, friends, and fans. The author describes Lincoln’s wandering, 1,900-mile journey, with well-wishers lining the tracks and huge crowds whose members clamored to shake his hand and hear a speech. Not every speech was memorable, nor were the many encounters, mishaps, and demonstrations, so Widmer wisely cuts away to deliver histories of the cities and states along the route, their citizens’ reactions to the impending crisis (multiple states had already seceded from the Union), and the impressions of witnesses. Plenty of Southern sympathizers proclaimed murderous intentions, and newspapers published breathless reports of hidden bombs, efforts to sabotage the rails, and cabals of sharpshooters. Concerned railroad officials called on Alan Pinkerton, head of the famous detective agency, whose operatives swarmed over the route and reported numerous plots to harm Lincoln. Widmer is not certain if any competent assassins were at work, but Pinkerton and rail officials had no doubt. They convinced a reluctant Lincoln to depart from his schedule at the end of his trip and travel incognito through Maryland to Washington on an ordinary passenger train. This passed without incident, but news of the furtive journey produced an avalanche of bad publicity before greater events took over. While general readers may lose interest during the journey, Lincoln buffs will undoubtedly devour the book. Pub Date: April 7, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-4767-3943-4 Page Count: 640 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020 Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR Share your opinion of this book More by Ted Widmer BOOK REVIEW edited by Ted Widmer with Clay Risen & George Kalogerakis edited by Ted Widmer by Ted Widmer by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006 The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the... Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.  He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.  Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006 ISBN: 0374500010 Page Count: 120 Publisher: Hill & Wang Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011 Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006 BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY More by Elie Wiesel by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel INTO THE WILD by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996 A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor... The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).  Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul. Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996 ISBN: 0-679-42850-X Page Count: 320 Publisher: Villard Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010 Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995 GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR More by Jon Krakauer by Jon Krakauer More About This Book SEEN & HEARD Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers Privacy Policy Terms & Conditions Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy © Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. 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Share this — Watch Full Episodes Read With Jenna Inspirational Relationships TODAY Table Newsletters Start TODAY Shop TODAY Awards Citi Concert Series Listen All Day Follow today More Brands On The Show TODAY Plaza What to know about 'Hillbilly Elegy,' JD Vance's memoir-turned-Ron Howard film Before JD Vance became Donald Trump’s running mate for the 2024 presidential election, he was an Ohio senator, lawyer and a bestselling author. Vance achieved literary recognization with the publication of his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” The book, which reflects on the circumstances of Vance’s family and the community in which he grew up, sparked discussions about the complexities of poverty in Appalachia and Rust Belt communities. Read on for more about Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” What is 'Hillbilly Elegy'? “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” is a 2016 memoir written by JD Vance. Vance’s memoir examines the socio-economic situation of white working-class people by holding up a mirror to his connection to the Appalachian communities where his mother and her family lived. The book includes Vance's recollection of the early struggles of his childhood, which were marked by his mother’s addiction and family violence. Vance recalls being left in the care of his grandparents, where his grandmother inspired him to rise above his circumstances. The book tracks Vance's journey as he joins the Marine Corps, studies at Ohio State University, and eventually attends Yale Law School. Harper Collins published the book, which appeared on the New York Times best-seller list. Why was 'Hillbilly Elegy' criticized? Since its release, Vance’s book has received both praise and criticism. The New York Times review of the book described the memoir as airing Vance’s “frustration with the nonworking white poor” while preaching “a message of tough love and personal responsibility.” “President Obama believes poverty, though it may have a cultural component, is largely a structural problem, one the government can play a large role in fixing,” The New York Times wrote in its book review. “Mr. Vance, a conservative, takes a far dimmer view.” In 2016, The Guardian panned Vance's memoir for its attribution of the economic conditions and disadvantages of the white working-class people to their own actions and decisions. In 2019 , The New York Times reported that a group called Y’ALL (Young Appalachian Leaders and Learners) protested Vance’s appearance at the 2018 Appalachian Studies Association conference. Is 'Hillbilly Elegy' a true story? “Hillbilly Elegy” is a memoir written by JD Vance and recounts the events and experiences of his own life. The book details his family’s struggles with poverty, addiction and instability, and, ultimately, his journey out. When was 'Hillbilly Elegy' made into a movie? In 2020, “Hillbilly Elegy” was made into a film directed by Ron Howard. The movie features Amy Adams as JD’s mother, Beverly Vance, Glenn Close as JD’s grandmother, and Gabriel Basso as JD Vance. Freida Pinto also appears in the film as Usha Chilukuri Vance, JD Vance's wife . How to watch 'Hillbilly Elegy' “Hillbilly Elegy” is currently available to stream on Netflix. Alex Portée is a senior trending reporter at TODAY Digital and is based in Los Angeles. NFL star Terrell Davis says he was handcuffed, escorted off United flight after trying to get ice for his son  ‘Bachelorette’ cast 2024: Meet the 25 men chosen for Jenn Tran This NBA veteran is now in the Olympics as a beach volleyball player Paris olympics. Brittany Mahomes shares new pics with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce overseas Pop culture. Trump picks Ohio Sen. JD Vance for vice president Stop & Shop will be closing 32 ‘underperforming’ stores: See the full list Nelly Furtado is back with her 7th album — but did she ever leave? Who is Usha Chilukuri Vance, the wife of JD Vance? Bride surprises groom by setting up first look with their puppy Pets & animals. ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ and ‘Charmed’ casts react to death of former co-star Shannen Doherty Advertisement Supported by Critic’s Notebook ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Gets a Blockbuster Sequel Our critic traces J.D. Vance’s shift from bootstrap memoirist to vice-presidential candidate. Share full article By A.O. Scott “I am not a senator, a governor or a former cabinet secretary,” J.D. Vance wrote on the first page of “Hillbilly Elegy,” by way of establishing his regular-guy bona fides. That was all true in 2016, when Vance was a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate with “a nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home and two lively dogs.” His memoir reads a little differently now. Listen to this article with reporter commentary This is partly because Vance is, in fact, a senator, and also, as of Monday, the Republican vice-presidential candidate. Much has been made of his political evolution over the past eight years, from never-Trump conservative to MAGA loyalist , from analyzing right-wing populism to embodying it. While Vance’s critics view this as brazen opportunism, he has explained his ideological shifts (including in a recent interview with Ross Douthat of The New York Times ) as a result of a twofold intellectual awakening: It turned out that Donald Trump wasn’t as bad as Vance had thought, and that American liberals were much worse. This turnabout is notable because part of the legend of “Hillbilly Elegy” is that liberals were its intended audience and biggest fans. Published by a major trade house, respectfully (if at times skeptically ) reviewed and widely discussed, it was both a message to the establishment and an application for membership. The book tells the story of two migrations. One is the large-scale movement of poor whites, among them the author’s maternal grandparents, from rural Appalachia to the cities and towns of the Rust Belt. The other is Vance’s path from one of those places — Middletown, Ohio — to the geographic and demographic precincts of the ruling class: New Haven; Silicon Valley; Washington, D.C. To the extent that “Hillbilly Elegy” is a bootstrap narrative — the chronicle of a young person’s rise in the face of adversity — it can be read as a vindication of the status quo. An imaginary reader, comfortably ensconced in the seat of relative privilege, will be gratified to learn that this ambitious Ohioan has pulled up a neighboring chair, and fascinated by the story of how he got there. The tale is painful but also inspiring. Vance’s childhood was shadowed by his mother’s struggle with opioid addiction, but he was saved by his loving grandparents, in particular by his salty, tenacious grandmother, Mamaw, whose portrait is the book’s most memorable literary achievement. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber?  Log in . Want all of The Times?  Subscribe . Buy new: $20.29 Return this item for free. Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no return shipping charges. Go to your orders and start the return Select your preferred free shipping option Drop off and leave! 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Return instructions Item must be in original condition and packaging along with tag, accessories, manuals, and inserts. Unlock any electronic device, delete your account and remove all personal information. Sorry, there was a problem. Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required . Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web. Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app. Image Unavailable To view this video download Flash Player Follow the author Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington Hardcover – April 7, 2020 Purchase options and add-ons. Print length 624 pages Language English Publisher Simon & Schuster Publication date April 7, 2020 Dimensions 6 x 1.6 x 9 inches ISBN-10 1476739439 ISBN-13 978-1476739434 See all details Get to know this book What's it about, amazon editors say.... Widmer does a great job of capturing the times and the president the times helped to create. From the Publisher Editorial Reviews About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details. Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (April 7, 2020) Language ‏ : ‎ English Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 624 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1476739439 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1476739434 Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.9 pounds Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.6 x 9 inches #491 in American Civil War Biographies (Books) #1,150 in US Presidents #2,238 in Political Leader Biographies Videos for this product Click to play video Abraham Lincoln Leaves Springfield Publisher Video The Foiled Plot to Murder Abraham Lincoln in 1861 Abraham Lincoln Learns to Lead About the author. I grew up in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and have always liked railroads. The chance to combine that with another passion -- Abraham Lincoln -- was too good to pass up. I'm grateful to all the librarians and archivists who made it possible to do all the research that I did for this book. Thanks to them, we can all travel (virtually) with Lincoln on his long train ride, and see a rapidly changing America out the train windows. Customer reviews Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness. Customers say Customers find the storyline amazing and thorough. They also describe the writing quality as well-written, well-researched, and documented. Readers also find the historical content interesting and informative. AI-generated from the text of customer reviews Customers find the historical content interesting and informative. They also say the book is an amazing chronicle of a pivotal time in our nation's history. Readers praise the author as a graceful storyteller and an accurate historian. They say the story is grounded on a deep and profound conviction that the Declaration's assertion that all men are created equal. They mention the book shows the power of truth and justice to erase the machinations of evil men. "...does this in a breezy storytelling style that is as interesting as it is informative . I highly recommend this book for all to read." Read more "...This is a wonderfully informative book about Lincoln's train trip to the nation's capital, that reveals yet another facet for Lincoln admirers to..." Read more "It is not only a good story, it is sending a message to the present day ." Read more "A stunning history of Lincoln’s perilous train journey to Washington for his inaugural. Beautifully written and suspenseful as a novel...." Read more Customers find the storyline amazing, exciting, and marvellous. They also say the book provides a thorough narrative of Lincoln's pre-inaugural journey to Washington. "...and prolific writer Ted Widmer pens what is certainly one of the best Lincoln books of the year...." Read more "It is not only a good story , it is sending a message to the present day." Read more " Beyond awesome . I am 75 years old and only now have begun to learn about and understand Lincoln’s impact on this country...." Read more "...Beautifully written and suspenseful as a novel . Inspires one to preserve our democracy yet again" Read more Customers find the writing quality of the book really well written, with a breezey storytelling style. They also say the author enriched their learning experience greatly with relevant issues. Readers also mention that the book is well researched and documented, helping them understand the roots of their issues. "...The author does this in a breezy storytelling style that is as interesting as it is informative. I highly recommend this book for all to read." Read more "...After a few missteps, his speeches became masterful , especially near the end, when he began to discover the mystical power that would lift his..." Read more "... Beautifully written and suspenseful as a novel. Inspires one to preserve our democracy yet again" Read more "...The author writes in a very literate and readable style , tracing Lincoln’s journey from Springfield to the White House in 1861...." Read more Customers find the characters in the book amazing, dedicated, loyal, and honest. They also say Lincoln has tremendous conviction and strength of character that continues to evolve. Customers also mention that he was an incredible man for his time and hard working. "...-- a most enthralling work of excellent research -- this book makes Lincoln more human , and focuses on how fragile the nation was when he took the..." Read more "...This book shows you the hard working, dedicated, loyal and honest personalities that made Lincoln so great...." Read more "...He was an incredible man for his time ." Read more " Lincoln was a special leader . This book shows the beginning of his presidency. Good read. Wish our current leadership read books like this one." Read more Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews Top reviews from the United States There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later.. Top reviews from other countries About Amazon Investor Relations Amazon Devices Amazon Science Sell products on Amazon Sell on Amazon Business Sell apps on Amazon Become an Affiliate Advertise Your Products Self-Publish with Us Host an Amazon Hub › See More Make Money with Us Amazon Business Card Shop with Points Reload Your Balance Amazon Currency Converter Amazon and COVID-19 Your Account Your Orders Shipping Rates & Policies Returns & Replacements Manage Your Content and Devices Conditions of Use Privacy Notice Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure Your Ads Privacy Choices Laptop Reviews Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 (15-inch) review: a big-screen entertainment machine A samsung laptop you might actually want. By Monica Chin , a senior reviewer covering laptops and other gadgets. Monica was a writer for Tom's Guide and Business Insider before joining The Verge in 2020. Photography by Amelia Holowaty Krales Share this story If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Samsung has released a number of Galaxy Books in the last few years. Despite generally being good devices with a recognizable brand name, most of them have remained Samsung-enthusiast purchases; none have truly entered the mainstream conversation.  So it seems fitting that the Galaxy Book Pro 360 isn’t a direct sequel to any preexisting Galaxy Books. Instead, it’s an attempt to combine the best features of Samsung’s previous PCs and create a device that Samsung knows it can do really well.  It worked. The Galaxy Book Pro 360 is targeting a fairly specific audience, but in two areas — its OLED screen and its three-pound weight — it’s a groundbreaking device that has little significant competition across the market. But what’s really exceptional is that you don’t have to sacrifice much to get those standout features. It’s solid in the other areas that matter, it comes with some neat software and has few significant problems. If there’s a device that could bring the Galaxy Book out of the territory of Samsung super-fans and into the mainstream market, this is it.  Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 specs as reviewed Display: 15.6-inch Super AMOLED, FHD (1920 x 1080) Dimensions: 13.97 x 8.98 x 0.47 inches (354.85 x 227.97 x 11.9 mm) Weight: 3.06 lbs (1.39 kg) Processor: Intel Core i7-1165G7 Storage: 1TB Wireless: Wi-Fi 6E ready, Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+), 802.11 ax 2x2, Bluetooth v5.1 Ports: one Thunderbolt 4, two USB Type-C, one combination audio jack, one microSD Price: $1,499 The 15-inch Galaxy Book Pro 360 starts at $1,299. For the base price, you get a Core i7-1165G7, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. For $200 you can upgrade to the model I’m reviewing, which has 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The only other difference between these configurations is that the base only comes in “mystic navy” (the color of the unit I have), while the pricier one also comes in “mystic bronze.” There’s also a 13-inch model, starting at $1,399.99, that will support 5G at some point (though it doesn’t yet).  That’s competitive pricing. The Galaxy Book Flex, Samsung’s most recent ultraportable touchscreen convertible, has an MSRP of $1,399 for an 8GB / 512GB model (though it’s often on sale now). Comparable Surface Laptop 4 and Surface Pro 7 Plus models start at $1,499 at the lowest. All Galaxy Book Pro 360 models also ship with an S Pen, which is just like the S Pen on the Galaxy Book Flex except that it’s 2.5 times thicker. As I noted in my initial look at the Book 360 , it really does feel like a real pen (especially compared to the S Pens that you get with Galaxy Note phones, which feel like toys in comparison), though I wish there were somewhere in the chassis to store it.  The quad-core Core i7-1165G7 is the same processor that powers a number of the best consumer laptops on the market. The Pro 360 was just fine for the large load of Chrome tabs and apps that I pushed it through during each day of testing. Performance was snappy, and I rarely heard the fans spin up (though I occasionally heard coil whine from the processor). Note that there’s no discrete GPU option, but Iris Xe graphics can lend a hand in some lightweight gaming and graphic work.  Then, there are a number of customization features that you can tweak in the Samsung Settings app. You can swap between cooling profiles, including a “no fan” mode if you want total silence. You can toggle “Studio Mode,” which is supposed to enhance your video quality on calls — while it wasn’t night and day, I did find that this made me look a bit better in low-light settings. One feature I didn’t love was Secret Screen, which purports to be a privacy screen but really just makes the app you’re using either translucent or darker (and it doesn’t work with every app). Maybe this makes it slightly harder to snoop, but it also makes work an odd experience, and you could achieve a similar effect by just dimming your screen. I’d invest in a laptop with a real privacy shield (such as HP’s Elite Dragonfly ) if you’ll be viewing highly sensitive material.  And then there are some bonuses for folks who are already Samsung devotees: you can expand your display onto a Galaxy Tab S7 or S7 Plus and quickly move files between Galaxy devices with Samsung’s Quick Share function. And the Pro 360 comes preloaded with some Samsung software, including Samsung Notes (which can sync between devices) and SmartThings.  Most of my (very few) quibbles with the device come from the outside. For one, the blue chassis is a fingerprint magnet (the lid was all smudged up after half a day of use). I also experienced some occasional palm-rejection issues with the touchpad, which improved but didn’t disappear when I bumped it down to the lowest sensitivity. And I know some people like flat keyboards, but this one is too flat for my taste, with just 1mm of travel.  AGREE TO CONTINUE: SAMSUNG GALAXY BOOK PRO 360 (15-INCH) Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them, since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate. To start using the Galaxy Book Pro 360 (15-inch), you’ll need to agree to the following: A request for your language A request for your region A request for your keyboard layout Windows 10 license agreement and Samsung end-user software license agreement Sign in with a Microsoft account Create a PIN You can also say yes or no to the following: Connect to Wi-Fi Set up the fingerprint sensor Privacy settings (online speech recognition, location, Find My Device, sharing diagnostic data, inking and typing, tailored experience, advertising ID) OneDrive backup Microsoft 365 Allow Microsoft to collect information (including your location and location history, contacts, voice input, speech and handwriting patterns, typing history, search history, calendar details, content and communication history from Microsoft services, messages and apps, and Microsoft Edge browsing history) to let Cortana provide personalized experiences and relevant suggestions That’s seven mandatory agreements and 14 optional agreements to use the Galaxy Book Pro 360. But there are a couple reasons why the Galaxy Book Pro 360 really stands out, and they easily make up for those quibbles. The first is the screen. The 13-inch Galaxy Book Pro 360 will be one of very few 13-inch OLED laptops on the market. OLED is more common in the 15-inch tier, but it’s unusual to see outside of creator-focused workstations with discrete GPUs. The most obvious use for this 15.6-inch OLED panel is likely entertainment, rather than on-the-go creative work. (That’s especially true because it’s just 1920 x 1080 resolution, not 4K.) The screen is quite sharp, with vibrant colors. (It maxed out our colorimeter, covering 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut and 100 percent of the sRGB color gamut). As we’d expect from an OLED panel, it delivers bright whites and unparalleled blacks. If you’re looking for a 15.6-inch laptop with an OLED display, you’re unlikely to find one at a lower price.  That said, there are a few things to note. First, it doesn’t get super bright, maxing out at just 276 nits in my testing. It kicked back some glare outdoors, though I was still able to use it. Second, it’s 16:9, which is an aspect ratio I’ve sworn off forever because it’s cramped for multitasking. And third, there’s some wobble when you type or use the touchscreen. It’s not the worst wobble I’ve ever seen, but it’s there.  Another standout feature: the Galaxy Book Pro 360 is really darn portable. It’s just a few millimeters thicker than the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra (0.46 inches). And at three pounds, it’s easily one of the lightest 15-inch laptops you can buy. The 15-inch Surface Laptop 4 and Galaxy Book Flex, both of which are also known for their lightweight builds, are almost half a pound heavier. I’ve never considered buying a 15-inch laptop myself, due to how much they tend to weigh; this is the first 15-incher I’ve reviewed that I can actually see myself carrying around all day.  The third benefit is one I wasn’t expecting: battery life. This laptop has a 68Wh battery, which isn’t huge for 15-inchers (though it’s bigger than you often see for a 15W processor with integrated graphics). It also has a display that could be a battery suck. Samsung’s last attempt at an OLED laptop had disappointing battery results. So I was pleasantly surprised by how long the Galaxy Book Pro 360 lasted. I averaged 10 hours and 23 minutes to a charge during my testing, which included using around a dozen Chrome tabs and some apps on the side with the screen around 200 nits of brightness. If you’re just using this for entertainment, and not as a primary work driver, you’ll likely get even more.  I’m a fan of the 15-inch Galaxy Book Pro 360, though I do think its audience is fairly specific. This is a laptop worth considering if you’re looking for an excellent big-screen entertainment experience while you’re out and about, and maybe also need to take notes for class or make artwork in your spare time. Bonus points if you’re already plugged into the Samsung ecosystem. Not everyone needs that kind of laptop — but if you do, this is a good one to look at. The device’s weight is a huge benefit, but what’s even more impressive is that you’re not sacrificing a lot to achieve that weight. You also get a premium build, a capable processor with plenty of RAM and storage, a decent port selection, a nice screen with stylus support, and all-day battery life, all for a competitive price. What ultimately makes this laptop worth its price is that the lightweight chassis is icing on the cake — it’s not a feature you have to compromise on a ton of other things to get.   If you’re a Samsung fan who hasn’t been sold on the Galaxy Book lineup so far, I’d say this is the one to get. I wish the hinge were sturdier, I wish the keyboard wasn’t quite so flat, and I wish the screen got a tad bit brighter. But I don’t see any of those things significantly hindering the overall experience. For once, Samsung has made a tough 2-in-1 to beat. Google is reportedly planning its biggest startup acquisition ever The fbi says it has ‘gained access’ to the trump rally shooter’s phone, it’s never been easier for the cops to break into your phone, amazon’s press-to-order dash buttons are officially discontinued, fbi is working to break into the phone of the trump rally shooter. More from Reviews The OnePlus 12R is a $500 phone with flagship tendencies Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds are its boldest, most unique earbuds yet JBL Authentics 300 smart speaker review: two assistants at once This iPod-like button could be a great smart home controller 164 COMMENTS Book Review The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site ... The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years th… In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror , The Verge tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Here, author Patrick Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of ... Europe on the Verge of a Revolutionary Breakthrough The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World, by Paul Wyman, (Twelve, 416 pp., $40) P atrick Wyman's The Verge is a narrative chimera, a work of history that ... The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the The creator of the hit podcast series Tides of History and Fall of Rome explores the four explosive decades between 1490 and 1530, bringing to life the dramatic and deeply human story of how the West was reborn.. In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, The Verge tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. REVIEW: The Verge, by Patrick Wyman Jane Psmith. Nov 20, 2023. The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, Patrick Wyman (Twelve, 2021). This is a weird Substack featuring an eclectic selection of books, but one of our recurring interests is the Great Divergence: why and how did the otherwise perfectly normal people living in the northwestern corner ... Holiday Book Review: 'The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance and Forty Still, turning around a thousand-year trend is no small thing, so I finished the book captivated by its story of the decline but unconvinced by the explanation for the rise. A new book, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance and Forty Years that Shook the World, 1490-1530, by historian Patrick Wyman, promised a more complete answer. And that ... 'The Verge': New Book Explores How Europe Came to Dominate the Globe The 'Great Men of History' Are Great at Getting You Killed. A new book explores how Western Europe became home to the world's 'great' powers … and what it cost everyone else to get there ... The Verge A Spanish queen. A Florentine printer. An English wool merchant. A disgruntled German monk. A Genoese explorer. According to Patrick Wyman, author and narrator of The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World (11.5 hours), these are among the actors who gave birth to the modern world. Wyman argues that from 1490 to 1530, a series of economic, religious and state ... The Verge's favorite books from 2023 The Marigold. $9. A dystopian novel about a variety of people navigating a bleak urban landscape. $20 at Amazon (paperback) $19 at Bookshop.org (paperback) $9 at Amazon (Kindle) Haunting ... Book Review: The Verge This is a book review of The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World by Patrick Wyman, with special mention to 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C Mann. If you like this you might like my review of Tom Holland's Dominion, where I also discuss causality in history and Martin Luther.. In this Kvetch: Amazon.com: Customer reviews: The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and The Verge, and history itself, is the story of living, breathing human beings whose blood, sweat and tears are as much a part of history as the results of great battles and quarrels over royal successions. The Verge is as much the story of wool traders and printers as it is that of mercenaries and emperors. These are not separate stories. The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that ... I wrote a book! Put simply, The Verge is about a relatively brief but incredibly eventful period in the history of Europe, the decades between 1490 and 1530, and their role in laying the groundwork for Europe's future role as the home of industrialization and global empires. The roots of those developments, I argue, can be found in the collision of incredibly disruptive processes at the ... The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty ... Format Hardcover. ISBN 9781538701188. The creator of the hit podcast series Tides of History and Fall of Rome explores the four explosive decades between 1490 and 1530, bringing to life the dramatic and deeply human story of how the West was reborn. In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror , The Verge tells the story of a ... The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World The creator of the hit podcast series Tides of History and Fall of Rome explores the four explosive decades between 1490 and 1530, bringing to life the dramatic and deeply human story of how the West was reborn.. In the best-selling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, The Verge tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Books The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site ... Briefly Noted Book Reviews Lincoln on the Verge, by Ted Widmer (Simon & Schuster). In February, 1861, crowds in eight states greeted the train carrying Abraham Lincoln, as President-elect, from Springfield, Illinois, to the ... Review: 'Verge,' By Lidia Yuknavitch : NPR Review: 'Verge,' By Lidia Yuknavitch Lidia Yuknavitch's new story collection ... He is an editor at Barrelhouse and his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Prospect ... LINCOLN ON THE VERGE Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour) Share your opinion of this book. On Feb. 11, 1861, three weeks before his inauguration, President-Elect Abraham Lincoln boarded a train for Washington, D.C. This lively account describes that eventful journey. The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the Amazon.com: The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World: 9781549165344: Patrick Wyman: Books ... Books. Select the department you want to search in ... Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington Lincoln on the Verge tells the story of a leader discovering his own strength, improvising brilliantly, and seeing his country up close during these pivotal thirteen days. From the moment the Presidential Special left the station, a new Lincoln was on display, speaking constantly, from a moving train, to save the Republic. Kobo's great color e-readers are held back by lock-in The Kobo Libra Colour and Kobo Clara Colour are very good e-readers with color displays! They even have support for Overdrive, but the UI feels more focused on selling books than reading them. JD Vance's Memoir 'Hillbilly Elegy': What To Know About The Book The New York Times review of the book described the memoir as airing Vance's "frustration with the nonworking white poor" while preaching "a message of tough love and personal ... Reviews The Verge Reviews is the place for all of that and more. Whether you're looking for buying advice, how to use products you already own, or the best deals on products we've tested and used ... 12 Books to Read: The Best Reviews of June 12 Books to Read: The Best Reviews of June Questions for quantum physics, Eisenhower's test, a revolution in the swimming pool and more books highlighted by our reviewers. What "Hillbilly Elegy" Tells Us About J.D. Vance and the 2024 Election A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times's Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. More about A.O. Scott Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington —Los Angeles Review of Books " Lincoln on the Verge reads partly as straight history, partly as a spy thriller and partly as travelogue. It's a portal to life in 19th-century America, an inspiring view of Lincoln's wisdom and personal courage, and a revelation of how close the United States came to being permanently divided even before ... Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 (15-inch) review: a big-screen ... Ports: one Thunderbolt 4, two USB Type-C, one combination audio jack, one microSD. Price: $1,499. The 15-inch Galaxy Book Pro 360 starts at $1,299. For the base price, you get a Core i7-1165G7 ... assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis