The Century of Columbus

A spirited defense of the most consequential hundred years in human history. James J. Walsh makes his case with brio: the century that began with Gutenberg's press and ended with Copernicus's sun-centered universe produced more lasting change than any era before or since. Columbus himself is the book's gleaming centerpiece, the man who shattered the old world’s horizons and flung open the door to everything that followed. But Walsh is just as passionate about the painters, the anatomists, the navigators, the lawyers, the merchants who alongside Columbus built the scaffolding of modernity. This is notdry chronicle but enthusiastic advocacy, a book that wants you to feel the electric excitement of an age when a Florentine merchant's son could redraw the map of the world and a German goldsmith could hand humanity the tool that would topple kings. For readers who believe the past is prologue, and that understanding where we came from illuminates where we're heading.