Dead Certainties [Paperback]

Simon Schama (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1998

Simon Schama, the author of "The Embarrassment of Riches" and "Citizens", sets out to tell the history of two certainties, of two deaths. In discussing the "speculations" surrounding them, he finds himself involved in a history he cannot classify - the unpredictable history of stories. On 13 September 1759, General James Wolfe, having led the British troops up the St Lawrence to victory in the Battle of Quebec, died on the Heights of Abraham. Schama examines this death, and how Wolfe was made to die again - through the spectacular painting by Benjamin West, and through the writings of the 19th-century historian Francis Parkman. Schama's second death concerns Parkman's uncle, George Parkman of Harvard Medical College, who disappeared in 1849 in mysterious circumstances and who was rumoured to have been murdered by a colleague. Through these incidents, Schama sheds light on the writing of history, the history of history, and the relationship of "story" to "history".

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a virtuoso performance, Harvard historian Schama underscores the yawning abyss between experiential knowledge of an event and historical interpretations of it. In the book's first half, heroic British general James Wolfe, killed in the battle for Quebec in 1759, emerges as a neurotic monomaniac thirsty for glory. We glimpse his death thrice: through the eyes of a fear-racked soldier who took part in the battle; through American painter, Benjamin West, whose grandiloquent Death of General Wolfe won him an appointment as court history painter to King George II, and through Boston Brahmin historian Francis Parkman, who helped make Wolfe a patriotic martyr. The second half deals with the case of Parkman's mercurial Uncle George--exacting landlord, physician, authority on insane asylums--whose dismembered body parts were found at Harvard Medical College one week after he disappeared on Thanksgiving Day, 1849. Although a genial, expansive Harvard chemistry professor was hanged for the crime, the conflicting testimony presented here casts doubt on the verdict. Schama ( Citizens ) blends fact, speculation and fictitious dialogue in a chronicle as gripping as a good detective novel. Illustrations. BOMC and QPB alternates.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

This book can be read on at least two levels. First, there are the two intriguing stories told by talented writer and noted historian Schama, author of Citizens ( LJ 4/1/89)-- one about the triumph and death of James Wolfe at Quebec in 1759, the second an exploration of the murder of the Boston Brahmin George Parkman in 1849. But Schama is after bigger game, and his target is the gap between a "lived event and its subsequent narration." In the chasm separating the two lies the ambiguity that obscures a more complete rendering of the past. This experiment in writing history attempts to close the gap through imagination--jumbling chronology to force the reader into more active participation in the story, and adding other voices to the usual historical narration. These include the musings of a governor of Massachusetts, the broad accents of a (fictional) soldier, and the urbane confessions of a Boston lawyer. These two "historical novellas," as Schama calls them, demonstrate the power of good storytelling in bringing history to life. Previewed in Prepub Alert , LJ 1/91; BOMC and Quality Paperback alternates.
- David B. Mattern, Papers of James Madison, Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Granta Books (April 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1862071357
• ISBN-13: 978-1862071353
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,730,013 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Simon Schama is a professor of art history and history at Columbia University, and is the author of numerous award-winning books; his most recent history, Rough Crossings, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. He is a cultural essayist for the New Yorker and has written and presented more than thirty documentaries for the BBC, PBS, and the History Channel, including The Power of Art, which won the 2007 International Emmy for Best Arts Programming.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars So, you want to read history???, October 21, 2000

By 

Dianne Foster "Di" (USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (Paperback)

A few years ago, I became a professional social scientist. As such, I became tangled in the beginning...what is truth? I never figured it out, but I had to go to work and earn a living so I took up the viewpoint that seemed most reasonable --material empiricism -- and began documenting my version of truth and getting it published.

In DEAD CERTAINTIES (UNWARRENTED SPECULATION), Simon Schama raises important questions about the truth of history. How do historians know what really happened? Well the truth is, they don't. At best, our reconstructions of the past are partial truths. They are partial truths because no one is free from prejudice. They are partial truths, because try as we might to be objective, we cannot help but place our own interpretation on "facts." They are partial truths because eye witnesses to history seldom know all the "facts." They are partial truths because language is alive and word meanings change over time. And, they are partial truths because eye witnesses often lie.

What really happened in the past times? In recent years, new historical practicioners have begun to revisit primary materials and attempt to piece together their version of what these documents tell them. This revisionist history has it's supporters, but in the end, who is to say their interpretations are free of bias and agenda?

In DEAD CERTAINTIES Schama revisits the story of Wolfe the British hero of the 1700's on the 'Heights of Abraham' in Canada. Probably every Canadian school child of my generation, plus a few Americans, remembers the words, "Wolfe the dauntless hero came and planted firm Britannia's flag on Canada's fair domain." I don't know if it's still politically correct to sing these words in Canada, but I believe at one time they were the words to the national anthem.

Everyone who's ever taken a course in art has probably seen a photograph of Benjamin West's monumental painting "The Death of General Wolfe." It is a magnificent painting of a beautiful young man in the last agony of life, looking toward a distant and dramatic horizon. The painting has inspired generations of Canadians to national patriotism. The painting supposedly depicts the last hour of General Wolfe. Schama says, "Not so fast." He then goes on to tell as best he can given the material at hand, what he believes happened on that fateful day when General Wolfe met his maker (maybe he did, maybe he didn't).

The book also contains a second "story" about a murder that took place in New England in the last century. This "story" reads like a detective fiction. Schama demonstrates though his own research who he thinks the real killer was. It is an excellent read even if you don't like history.

This book sheds a little light on historiography--how historians have framed history in the past and how they go about it today. The book should be required reading for anyone who wants to know more about history and how it is written.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful story about how we come to believe history, May 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (Paperback)

Simon Schama is a historian who is not afraid to acknowledge that history has a literary dimension. In "Dead Certainties", he tells a fascinating story in a style more familiar from historical novels, especially historical mysteries like "The Plague Tales" and "An Instance of the Fingerpost". But while you can read the book strictly for enjoyment, as if it were a novel, Schama has a serious point to make by writing in this accessible style. That point is that historical events are often highly ambiguous; that the records of the past that survive are often contradictory, and that writing history requires historians to provide the continuity by interpreting the past. It helps that the stories he uses for this demonstration are grisly: the deaths of General James Wolfe at the battle of Quebec in 1759, and the murder in 1849 of George Parkman, a very unusual member of Boston society, by a Harvard professor at the end of his financial and professional rope. Dramatic deaths beg to be explained, to be made to make sense, even though they may not be evidence of great causes, but simply the results of strings of chance. Ultimately, Schama wants readers to remember even when they are reading the most prosaic and authoritative histories that someone had to decide which facts counted, what they meant, and which sets of facts go together to explain the past. Once you read this book, you should never look at histories in the same way again.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An "Unwarranted" Review?, December 31, 2002

By 

Martin P. McCarthy (North Chili, New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (Paperback)

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.