10/09/2025
Christopher Columbus was born Cristoforo Colombo, in the autumn of 1451 in the Mediterranean port city of Genoa, and he died in the Spanish city of Valladolid in May 1506, as don Cristóbal Colón. More than five centuries later, we are still arguing over his life and its significance. Millions if not billions of people have learned his name. Most have some sense of what he did, that it was momentous, a great achievement, an act of primacy. But was his achievement “great” because he “discovered America” and thus made possible the hemisphere’s “great” nations? Or was it an apocalyptic catastrophe for tens of millions of Indigenous and African peoples?
In THE NINE LIVES OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, acclaimed historian Matthew Restall, perhaps the leading scholar of the Spanish Empire, presents a new, authoritative biography of Columbus, while at the same time tracing his many afterlives down into our own time. He explores the mysteries, many of them manufactured, that color our understanding of Columbus even in the twenty-first century—mysteries surrounding Columbus’s name, nationality, place of birth, ancestry, education, religion, intellectual vision, moral fiber, s*xual proclivities, and current resting place. He shows how Columbus became an iconic American hero in the nineteenth century, and how a parallel hero emerged in the form of the Italian American Columbus.
Whatever one’s views of Columbus, Restall’s book is the necessary, definitive account. It dispels the myths and gives us Columbus as he was. It shows how he has been distorted in the centuries since his death—and how we might come to understand him, and his legacies, anew.
Available now.
https://wwnorton.com/books/the-nine-lives-of-christopher-columbus
Jacket Design by Devin Grosz
