SOURCE: “The History Man,” in New Statesman, June 7, 1991, pp. 42–43.

In the following review, Porter offers a positive assessment of Dead Certainties.

As small books go, this one is receiving an avalanche of attention. Is it all a publicity hype, or a genuine happening? No one would pretend that Dead Certainties is the most momentous work of history to have hit the shops in recent memory. If Schama's own The Embarrassment of Riches (1987) and Citizens (1989) had epic intentions, this reads more like an experiment and (in the Graham Greene sense) an entertainment.

It's constructed as a string of subtly interconnected essays. A reconstruction of the death of General Wolfe at the Battle of Quebec in 1759, wresting Canada from the French, leads on to a vignette of the life of Francis Parkman, the 19th-century Harvard biographer of Wolfe, who devoted his life to the study of Anglo-French rivalry in North...