The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus, the Genoese navigator once considered a hero, is now blamed for bringing plunder and genocide to the Americas. In The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, Matthew Restall takes us beyond polemic, sifting through the evidence across nations, languages and five centuries to explore the central questions of Columbiana. He demonstrates that we know a great deal about Columbus’s life and that Columbus was not as remarkable as many have assumed—or as he himself believed. But his afterlives are another story: Restall narrates the international contest over Columbus’s bones and the dozens of claims on his birthplace, examines how he became a hero and more. The result is a kaleidoscopic account of a single man that becomes a new history of the modern world.