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Avg. Rating: 3.5
This thing was awful!
This was most likely a failed attempt at selling some more copies. Being a student of history myself I understand the "truth" that historians do not know exactly what happened in the past. They do, however, attempt to reconstruct the events in the past and offer some explanation as to why they happened and how they affect us today.
Schama does none of the above. Without any footnotes or sources to go by one cannot trace Scahma's logic and reasoning. Nor can one draw their own conclusions from the documents Schama uses because they simply aren't there. By this I mean he adds a note at the end saying, more or less, "screw you" to anyone that wants to follow his work.
If one is looking for a good read on the French and Indian War checkout Fowler's "Empires at War". In the end Schama's book is perfectly titled "Unwarranted Speculations" indeed.
Interesting historiography experiment, less interesting narrative
Other reviews address the ways Schama deals with issues of truth, the boarder between history and fiction, and techniques of recreating the past in more vivid and personal ways. And as a book for stimulating discussion among historians and history buffs, Dead Certainties is an admirable work.
However, Schama seems also interested in writing narrative history for the sake of storytelling (and perhaps to reach a broader audience). As such, Dead Certainties has some serious flaws. The connections between the two sections of the book (the first quarter is about "The Many Deaths of General Wolfe" while the second is about a murder of a prominent Boston man a century later) are almost nonexistent, and the first story simply lacks dramatic power. Schama also fails to situate the narratives into any broader history; he does little convince the reader that his stories matter, even if they (or the second, murder mystery story, at least) are good reads.
There is plenty of food for thought, but the result of Schama's experiment is something not quite interesting and tightly constructed enough to compete to real historical fiction, and not quite trustworthy enough to be considered real history.
An "Unwarranted" Review?
Simon Schama's "Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)" is an interesting foray into the murky realm of historiography. The book is comprised of two "tales:" that of General James Wolfe who (purportedly) meets his end at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 and that of George Parkman, a Harvard Professor who met a grisly end in 1849 - which Schama treats as an historical "murder mystery."Critics of this work charge that Schama has engaged in historical chicanery by incorporating fiction into both accounts and has, thus, mucked up the waters of what is a proper "history." To this, Schama admits so much in his text and also admits to that being his point. What is interesting is Schama's attempt to stake out a dividing line between what is "historical fact" and what is "historical fiction" and in so doing, obliterate that line. After all, historical fiction is based upon "historical fact" and many historians have written histories based upon "historical fact" that were modified or even overturned after those "historical facts" were proven to be inventions of fiction. We have a certain reliance on a consistent historical past "reality" or else we run into an Orwellian 1984 reality of a constantly changing historical past. Yet, we can never be quite certain of the "facts" that make up our histories and as Schama puts it: "... historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness, however thorough or revealing their documentation. Of course they make do with other work: the business of formulating problems, of supplying explanations about cause and effect. But the certainty of such answers always remains contingent on their unavoidable remoteness from their subjects. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot." (p. 320) "Dead Certainties" is an engaging and thoughtful piece of scholarship/literature that should be taken as such - and as such, it is not perfect.
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