SOURCE: “The Fog of History,” in New Republic, June 3, 1991, pp. 39–41.

In the following review, Delbanco offers a favorable assessment of Dead Certainties.

Simon Schama has become one of the very few contemporary historians who are read as much for themselves as for their subjects. In quick succession he has published two books. The Embarrassment of Riches (a study of “the moral ambiguity of good fortune” in Dutch culture of the seventeenth century) and Citizens (which he calls a “chronicle” of the French Revolution), to popular as well as critical acclaim. They are long books, written in a prose that is both an efficient engine of narration and a medium for self-reflection. Schama likes to pause to make analogical connections, and he writes with a wicked wit: it was, we learn in Dead Certainties, Harvard's President Walker, “arthritic and stone deaf” by the end of his tenure, who “established...