SOURCE: “Reports of War,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. C, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 147–53.

In the following excerpt, Lewis offers a positive assessment of Dead Certainties.

Simon Schama, a distinguished historian, assumes in Dead Certainties—correctly I think—that history is the product of human imagination. Interested not only in how the history of war is shaped, Schama is also fascinated by how these historical accounts become underwritten by a nation's values. (His subtitle, Unwarranted Speculations, indicates that he understands his view as a counterstatement to the process of entangling national identity with accounts of war.)

Schama takes up British General Wolfe's famous death in battle at Quebec on September 13, 1759. Writing from various points of view, including Wolfe's Schama renders with fact and imagination the complexity of both that battle and Wolfe's character—e.g., his family difficulties, his quirks including hypochondria, and his probable recitation to his troops on...