Customer Reviews

Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was always fascinated by the great explorers; Columbus, Magellan, Da Gama. The stories that we learned about these men in school seemed like cliche's. What were they really like? What were they really looking for?

This scholarly yet accessible book tells their stories as well as the tales of many explorers we have not heard about. Dr. Fernandez-Armesto probes deeply yet prudently. In a mere 400 pages he covers the history of exploration in chronological fashion. We travel across the sea to Brasil with Cabral. We visit the polar regions with Amundsen and Scott. Captain Cook takes us everywhere. We go into the Amazon and the heart of Africa.

This book is a marvel. Your children will be enriched. Adults will be illuminated. Beautifully written, smoothly flowing, a wonder to read. This reviewer came away stunned and delighted.

I have had the opportunity of reading Professor Fernandez-Armesto`s book that describes the history of global exploration. I must confess that it has enlightened my mind up to the point of finding answers to many of the questions I have quoted since my school years. His original and provoking theories justify why Europeans seek the discovery of new then unknown lands (when boats where able to sail upwind, when the Canary Islands entered the map and when the determination of rulers and financiers made it possible) whilst other peoples with similar or even great development of sailing technology and enjoying of similar trade winds did not succeed in conquering other territories as they lacked the sense of long term view. I have it on my bedside table to refresh my memory on who did what. It has already given me the opportunity of sharing what I have learnt through its lecture with my friends and I am sure each time I review it, will be able to gather new interesting information. I strongly recommend scholars and everyone interested in history to browse its pages and glean ideas from our history to learn about our future.

I only write reviews for books I like, and this one I liked a lot. An excellent overview of global exploration. The author looks at pretty much every culture on the planet, and how each searched the world around it, and how humanity spread and intermingled. This is extremely readable lay history, transforming much of the dry narrative we encountered in history texts at school into engaging story. Many new insights into familiar historical scenarios. For example, L'anse aux Meadows, the famous 'Norse' ruins on Newfoundland, may in fact be the remains of a settlement of Irish monks, not vikings. They shared a similar technology. Anything found there could have been brought by St. Brendan wannabes (spindle whorls and such). Great stuff!
Might buy this one as Christmas gifts for people.

A prior reviewer gave this book a poor review because it did not show the harsh side of Spanish imperialism. This book isn't about Spanish imperialism. It's about exploration. And it does a very good job, I think, of presenting a global history of the subject. It's not perfect, of course, but it's very good. It kept me reading for hundreds of pages until the end when the coverage shifted to modern exploration, such as the probing of the Arctic in the early 20th century. Nothing wrong with the writing, I just wasn't as interested in that as I was in the earlier periods covered. Good book, I recommend it for anyone interested in exploration. Fernández-Armesto is a talented writer and will occasionally sprinkle in personal experiences when appropriate-- for example on a local Australian politician pandering to the local Portuguese community by building a statue of a Portuguese explorer when the Portuguese likely never ventured to Australia, whereas the Javanese and Dutch probably did.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has added a rather unique new slant to the well-chronicled history of exploration, repositioning it as an eons-old process of de-globalization and re-globalization. Under the assumption that humans started out with a concise cultural geography when Homo Sapiens first arose, "explorers" then initiated the mass migration of humans throughout the world, leading to cultures diverging and losing contact with each other. This process was reversed when classical explorers brought the world back together - a process that continues today as globalization. This is an interesting thesis and it certainly helped Fernandez-Armesto construct an organic history of exploration that is unique and very inclusive. He covers all historical episodes of exploration with equal enthusiasm, combining well-known tales of Columbus, Magellan, and company with episodes like the Polynesian dispersal throughout the Pacific and unsung efforts to explore the interiors of Siberia and Australia. Fernandez-Armesto also debunks some well-worn historical myths along the way and compiles the latest knowledge from archeology and anthropology. But the problem with his unique theoretical structure is that he combines many types of human cultural behavior into an increasingly vague category called "exploration," from the earliest migrations and diasporas to the worst in colonialism and imperialism. There is also a very inconsistent regard for legends and folk histories - Fernandez-Armesto fully believes some but ruthlessly dismisses others. Overall the whole endeavor becomes a rather tedious repeat of information that the knowledgeable reader has probably seen many times - although here it is repeated in a book with a unique twist on the subject and a vast sense of inclusiveness. [~doomsdayer520~]

This book's strength is its encapsulation of a wide swath of human migration into concise segments and sufficient historical reference. The author largely avoids the in-the-weeds details of each major exploration and colonial settlement. Reviewers criticize the author's abbreviated and unsourced assertions. There are some courageous dismissals of widely held conventional wisdoms. But there are also some clearly Spanish biases shining through: See the curt rejection of the late 16th century British maritime prowess as that of a barbarian nation, particularly in its defeat of the Spanish armada; See the avoidance of detailing Spanish atrocities in the exploration of South America; See no mention of the formal closure of Spain's colonial era in the late 19th Century with the Spanish-American war.

Most irritating is the author's tone in the final segment of the book, where he broadly swipes at late-19th/early-20th century explorations as mere "glory-seeking." Some of those expeditions, while fruitless and ego-driven, set the foundations for subsequent engineering, scientific, transport and commercial developments that propelled human civilization to greater advancements and quality of life.

Based on the reviews below, I was very much expecting a book that will explain to me why certain facts in history REALLY happened. To be true, the book offered some interesting insights to me, like it was better to sail into (against) the wind than with the wind, as the sailors have much better chance of coming home.

On the other hand, the author sometimes makes enormous statements without somehow backing them by evidence - like he claims that American civilizations (North and South) are so different that they must clearly be coming from different origins. I am actually believing this, but I would expect more analysis and not just one paragraph stating this.

However, what I lacked the most in the book is the non-attempt to explain why things happened. I mean the author tries to do it and sometimes he succeeds. But for the most interesting events, his reasoning and solutions provided are of the "scratch-the-surface" type. His long elaboration why the Americas were discovered in 1490s (and not in other time), ends with a statement that this is because the events that happened in 1480s - WHOA, but then he does not really come back to say, what made the 1480s happen in that time...making all his analysis standing naked as it could have happened any time. And there are many more of these unfinished or unfulfilling (at least to me) statements - sort-of half-solutions.

In summary, what I really liked about the book is:
1. It frames your thinking so that you can at least ask some of the very important questions... and try to find the answers to the questions. 2. It also does a really excellent job of summarizing the key facts in the history of exploration.

But if you are looking for well-reasoned answers to questions why the events happened, you will not always find the most satisfying ones.

I stopped reading after about 70 some pages. In one map he has Khotan and the Turfan Depression virtually co-located, and both southeast(!) of the Taklamakan Desert. In another he references Novgorod in the caption while Nizhny Novgorod is marked on the map and labeled as Novgorod, a mistake of about 500 miles.
The author makes maddeningly vague references to so many things never explained. One of the last frustrations I experienced before dropping the book was when he mentioned the Islamic traveler Ibn Battuta. He was cited as possibly the greatest traveler of all time and dismissed, all in about half a paragraph. I lived in Hawaii several years and talked to modern Polynesian navigators resurrecting the old ways of navigation. The author's vague outlines of Polynesian methods of finding far off islands are deficient in detail and just plain wrong in some assertions.
I'm not a book reviewer, or specialist, or historian, just a retired army first sergeant who likes to read. If I can spot that many errors and frustrations in less than 80 pages, I wonder what an expert would find.

This was a gift for my dad, who's a voracious reader and fascinated by people and history. He loved this book!

This belongs to the growing body of scholarly 'pop' histories that have their appeal in producing accessible descriptive narratives geared to a broad readership. This, as with other like works (Jared Diamond, et al), has little in the way of scholarly apparatus, with no bibliography and only a few pages of endnotes. Fernandez-Armesto dispenses with any background explanation of what he means by 'exploration', and indeed he so conflates the meaning of the word we learn that 'exploration' began with early homo sapiens many thousands of years ago. Without providing us with a definition of what he means, we are left to follow his somewhat forced narrative that connects any form of human movement (migratory pressures, trade, war, etc.) with exploration. This is a far cry from the generally acknowledged connotation associated with deliberate travels of discovery (James Cook being a prominent early example in the modern era). In writing a popular narrative, the author can wax poetic with sentences like: "Exploration, however, does not only happen outward: there are often inward crevices and gaps to fill, slack to take up." Imagine a college freshman using such language in a paper on exploration!