New Books In World Affairs

If you are an enthusiast of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), The Great Cat Massacre (1984), or The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), then Michael Wintroub‘s The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a must read. Simply put, this is a book that will lead you down a path of wonder, and possibly, saddle you with a good head scratch. However, no one ever said that an itch near the cranium translates to feeling lousy; in this instance, what we have here is a richly researched and thought-provoking (no pun intended) piece of scholarship. Wintroub, Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley, is interested in how ideas that are commonplace today (like information-gathering, expertise, confidence, scale, and replication) originated over four centuries ago. This is the story of two brothers who were tasked with a monumental, trail-blazing journey from their home in Dieppe, France all the way to Sumatra. How did two humanist