SOURCE: “Calling All Browsers,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. CIV, No. 4, Fall, 1996, pp. lxxxi–lxxiv.

In the following review, Taylor offers a mixed assessment of Landscape and Memory.

Landscape and Memory, all 664 learned pages of it, establishes Professor Simon Schama and his work as the smart-money alternative to the Internet. This new offering, priced at a mere forty dollars, already threatens to eclipse the computer and may yet deliver us from Microsoft and the toils of the World Wide Web. Browsers now enjoy a choice. And those who choose to sound the professor's seemingly bottomless fund of oddments will echo Sydney Smith on the opulence of Macaulay's conversation: “He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop.”

Consider, for example, Professor Schama's phantasmagoria, otherwise known as Central Park: “The woods and trails of Upper Manhattan are certainly not the only lair where ancient myths and demons, best...