SOURCE: “Visionary Historians,” in Hudson Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 125-32.

In the following excerpted review essay, Wilhelmus offers a positive assessment of The Last Station.

History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final clauses—example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future—are shamelessly pragmatic.

—Jorge Luis Borges, from “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”

Current theory explains that written history reinvents the past to meet the needs of the present. “Truth,” according to Nietzsche, is the product of a “mobile army of metaphors”: and there is no truth except the one portrayed in the array of voices and vocabularies which translates event into consciousness. Since...