You scan the book reviews? Some are plodding, dull recitals of the plot – actually this is good – saves reading the book; others are masterful.
Dominic Green in The Spectator was on top of his game reviewing Island People; The Caribbean and the World by the improbably named Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Dominic wins me over by kicking off; “short of writing a thesis in many volumes only a haphazard, almost a picaresque, approach can suggest the peculiar mood and tempo of the Caribbean and the turbulent past from which they spring”. He is quoting from the preface to The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
I don’t recommend J J-S’s book, although I have not read it, but the review is a masterclass in the art of put-down-manship. Allow me just to quote the last words of Dominic’s review.
There are errors of basic fact, too. Jelly-Shapiro thinks “implicacions ” is French, that the Schengen Treaty “created the EU”, that the official residence of the “limey bureaucrat” ambassador to Barbados is a “manse”, and that Elizabeth I was on the throne in 1625. If Chris Blackwell’s mother Blanche reads Island People, she may be alarmed to discover that she is dead. If the Caribbean peoples are doomed to repeat their turbulent past because they cannot forget it, the least a historian can do is remember it correctly.
I think that is so much more enjoyable than reading the book. Poor old Jelly – expect he’s wobbling a bit. It’s his first book so, maybe, can do better next time.
https://youtu.be/ggr90ATnNik