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The Man Who Gave His Name to America
Random House
August 2007
On Sale: August 7, 2007
256 pages
ISBN: 1400062810
EAN: 9781400062812
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
In 1507, European cartographers were struggling to redraw
their maps of the world and to name the newly found lands of
the Western Hemisphere. The name they settled on: America,
after Amerigo Vespucci, an obscure Florentine explorer. In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe
Fernández-Armesto answers the question “What’s in a name?”
by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the
life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as
he really was: a sometime slaver and small-time jewel
trader; a contemporary, confidant, and rival of Columbus; an
amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor by dint of a
series of disastrous failures and equally grand
self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and
amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively
readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to
the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across
the Atlantic of Columbus to the brave New World where
fortune favored the bold. Amerigo Vespucci emerges from these pages as an irresistible
avatar for the age of exploration–and as a man of genuine
achievement as a voyager and chronicler of discovery. A
product of the Florentine Renaissance, Amerigo in many ways
was like his native Florence at the turn of the sixteenth
century: fast-paced, flashy, competitive, acquisitive, and
violent. His ability to sell himself–evident now, 500 years
later, as an entire hemisphere that he did not “discover”
bears his name–was legendary. But as Fernández-Armesto ably
demonstrates, there was indeed some fire to go with all the
smoke: In addition to being a relentless salesman and
possibly a ruthless appropriator of other people’s efforts,
Amerigo was foremost a person of unique abilities, courage,
and cunning. And now, in Amerigo, this mercurial and elusive
figure finally has a biography to do full justice to both
the man and his remarkable era.
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