SOURCE: “Academic Persuasions: On Sahlins and Schama,” in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 387–98.

In the following excerpt, Ryan commends Schama's erudition and engaging narrative in Landscape and Memory, but finds Schama's thesis and unconventional scholarship problematic.

I admit it: the two books brought together here are not obviously connected in any way. They weren't written to confront each other, since Simon Schama is an historian and Marshall Sahlins is an anthropologist; and they don't discuss related issues or even share a theme. What intrigues me, then, is the two writers’ rhetorical approaches, particularly because their divergent strategies have loomed large in reviews published in the middle- to high-brow press. Such commentaries also mention, quite accurately, that [Marshall Sahlins's] How “Natives” Think and Landscape and Memory offer vibrant, compendious narratives that gleam with intelligence and panache. This marked sense of style, which is echoed in rather...