SOURCE: “Contending Narratives, Plausible Truths,” in Commonweal, September 13, 1991, pp. 519–20.

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

Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, published in 1989, is a sweeping, dramatically presented story reminiscent, in its style of telling, of the great narrative histories of the nineteenth and twentieth century: Macaulay on England in the late seventeenth century, Michelet or Carlyle on revolutionary France, Barbara Tuchman or Edmund Wilson on political currents in the early twentieth century. Like them or not, you cannot deny their mastery of storytelling. Filled with personalities, highly developed intellectual and social contexts, and juicy anecdotes, Schama's Citizens—like those classics of readability—is what first-rate historical narration used to be like before our own age of academic scholarship, bar graphs, elaborately deployed methodologies, and endless qualifications couched in jargon.

Schama is the Mellon Professor in the Social Sciences...