• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Lincoln Paine

All history is maritime history

  • Books
    • The Sea and Civilization
    • Down East
    • Ships of the World
    • Ships of Discovery and Exploration
    • Warships of the World to 1900
  • Other Writing
    • Articles, Chapters, and Talks
    • Book Reviews
    • Other Pieces
    • Miscellaneous Offerings
  • Recordings
    • Interviews
    • Talks
  • About
  • Contact

Book Reviews

Review essay: Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will, by Judith Schalansky

World Ocean Journal 2 (2015): 16–23

According to one estimate, there are upwards of 8.8 million islands in the world. As Christian Depraetere, a leading practitioner of nissology (the study of islands) has put it, “islands are the rule rather than the exception.” From a nissological perspective, the visible land of our bluewater orb constitutes nothing more than a sprawling archipelago, dominated by the big islands of America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica to be sure, but a cluster of islands nonetheless. If this were not the case, ships would not be central to world trade.More

Review of Encyclopedia of Exploration. Vol. 5, Invented and Apocryphal Narratives of Travel, by Raymond John Howgego

International Journal of Maritime History, 25:2 (2013): 299–300.

It is hard to overstate John Howgego’s achievement as the author of the five-volume Encyclopedia of Exploration. The first four volumes are masterpieces of research and clear writing. However monumental the effort to bring them to press, it is easy to imagine the monumental but straightforward ambition to create a catalogue raisonée of the literature of exploration.More

Review of New Bedford’s Civil War, by Earl F. Mulderdink, III

International Journal of Maritime History 25:1 (2013): 401–402.

In the acknowledgements of this well-researched study, Earl Mulderink quotes the remarks of an antebellum historian of the country’s once premier whaling port: “I am aware that much of the material of this history is wanting in arrangement, but it should be remembered that I have been obliged to collect my information from a great variety of sources … during a period of many years.” It is clear from the seventy-four dense pages of notes that Mulderink, a professor of history at Southern Utah University, has documented his subject thoroughly, and he draws on a stunning array of sources, including soldiers’ letters and diaries, affidavits for pensions, newspapers, published sermons, censuses, R.G. Dun & Company credit reports, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century secondary sources.More

Review of India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza—“India Book,” by S. D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman

The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 21 (2011): 300–301.

The preservation of medieval documents owes much to chance. For works whose authors did not belong to an institution with an interest in corporate memory, like a house of worship or a government, the odds were long indeed. When the documents in question constitute little more than the commercial ephemera of a minority community, the survival of several thousand paper and vellum fragments verges on the miraculous. It is thus fitting that just such a collection of records—most written in Judaeo-Arabic with a Hebrew alphabet— should have been preserved in the storeroom (geniza) of Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, where they were deposited by observant merchants who regarded the destruction of papers containing the name of God—in salutations, for instance—a sacrilege.More

Review of Encyclopedia of Exploration. Vol. 4: 1850 to 1940: Continental Exploration, Raymond John Howgego.

International Journal of Maritime History 21:2 (2009): 438–39.

Raymond John Howgego’s reputation as a master of the genre and authority on his chosen subject was assured with the publication of the Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800, the first volume of the quartet, only six years ago. The previous volume, on exploration of “The Oceans, Islands and Polar Regions” in the same period, has a more traditional maritime orientation, to be sure, yet this fourth and final volume is of particular interest for its coverage of what we might call fresh-water maritime history.More

Review of Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean, Dionisius S. Agius

Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 18:2 (2008): 120–21.

Rarely do books come along that make such a demonstrable contribution to the field of maritime history as Dionisius Agius’s Classic Ships of Islam, a work that effectively re-lays the foundation for the study of Muslim shipping in the western Indian Ocean. “This is what the book is about: the Classic Ships of Islam, the story of river boats and ocean-going vessels,” in the author’s own words, “these are the best examples of ship-types recorded by Muslim historians, geographers, travelers and storytellers. Classic Ships of Islam is about types of craft, their hull design, and equipment, but also about seamanship and technology in the context of the broader historical framework.”More

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Articles, Chapters, and Talks
  • Book Reviews
  • Other Pieces
  • Miscellaneous Offerings
  • Interviews
  • Talks

Recent Posts

  • A Sea-Change for the Classroom: Maritime Identities—Seas, Ships, and Sailors—the Law and Teaching World History
  • World History Connected forum introduction — “Something Rich and Strange”: Maritime Law in World History
  • Conversations from the Pointed Firs: “What is Maine? Who is Maine?”
  • Separated at Birth: The Estranged History of the First Centuries of American-Indian Relations
  • Rediscovering the Age of Discovery

Copyright © 2022 Lincoln Paine · All rights reserved · site by iKnow Web Design