Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America - Paperback

by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Author)

In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto answers the question "What's in a name?" by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a rogue and raconteur who counted Christopher Columbus among his friends and rivals; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor through a series of disastrous failures and equally grand self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across the Atlantic of Columbus to the brave New World where fortune favored the bold.

Amerigo Vespucci emerges from these pages as an irresistible avatar for the age of exploration-and as a man of genuine achievement as a voyager and chronicler of discovery. And now, in Amerigo, this mercurial and elusive figure finally has a biography to do full justice to both the man and his remarkable era.

Praise for Amerigo

"Wonderfully idiosyncratic and intelligent."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Fascinating . . . [Fernández-Armesto's] lively style is effective in evoking the flashy and violent world of Renaissance Europe."
-The Washington Post Book World

"An outstanding historian . . . [Fernández-Armesto] introduces Amerigo Vespucci as an amazing Renaissance character independent of his name's fame-and does Fernández-Armesto ever deliver."
-Booklist (starred review)

"Dazzling . . . an elegant tale of Vespucci's ability to transform himself from a merchant into an explorer and conqueror of new worlds."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST

Front Jacket

From food to the spread of political ideas, the landmass from northern Canada to the southern tip of Argentina is complexly bound together, yet these connections are generally ignored. In this groundbreaking and vividly rendered work, leading historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tells, for the first time, the story of our hemisphere as a whole, showing why it is impossible to understand North, Central, and South America in isolation, and looking instead to the intricate and common forces that continue to shape the region.
With his trademark erudition, imagination, and thematic breadth, Fernandez-Armesto ranges over commerce, religion, agriculture, the environment, the slave trade, culture, and politics. He takes us from man's arrival in North America to the Colonial and Independence periods, to the "American Century" and beyond. For most of human history, the south dominated the north: as Fernandez-Armesto argues in his provocative conclusion, it might well again.
A panoramic yet richly textured story that embodies fresh ways of looking at cross-cultural exchange, conflict, and interaction, The Americas demolishes our traditional ways of looking at the hemisphere, putting in place a compelling and fruitful new vision.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the Prince of Asturias Professor of History at Tufts University, is the author of several books, including The Americas, Millennium, Columbus, and Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food. He is the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Cairo Medal, the John Carter Brown Medal, and the Premio Nacional de Investigación of Spain's Sociedad Geográfica Española. His work has appeared in twenty-four languages, and his journalism and broadcasts appear frequently in Spanish and British media.