Reviewers for this journal are expected to uphold the highest possible professional standards at all times, so the present reviewer’s blackguardly first notion to copy out verbatim K.C. Harrison’s review of Vol. 3 The Renaissance (Reference Reviews 99/228), except for a few essential modifications here and there, had reluctantly to be abandoned. This was a pity since the review would have been authoritative, relevant, well argued and, more to the point, would have spared me the unenviable task of finding different words, and an alternative approach, to arrive at the same general conclusion. On reflection, however, it would no doubt have been difficult to slip it past the editor’s razor keen eye. But it was tempting all the same.
A revision and re‐ordering of Salem Press’s 30‐volume Great Lives from History series, this mighty venture strides on with commendable expedition. In this new volume 337 biographical essays printed in the original series have been rearranged from a geographical to a chronological perspective and are all the better for it. They have been joined by 40 new entrants. All the essays follow the same standard format, beginning with a brief note of the subject’s birth and death dates and places, the area of achievement, and his or her specific contribution. The main section of each entry is divided into three complementary parts: early life, life’s work, and a considered and reflective summary. This is followed by an annotated and evaluative bibliography to provide a starting point for further research.
A wide net was cast to select the entrants for this volume and, although most belong to the old kingdoms of Western Christendom (where most of the contemporary movers and shakers had their origin), or to the USA, China claims five, India three, Iran one, Japan four, Lithuania one, Poland one, Russia seven, and Ukraine one. Perhaps subconsciously influenced by a recent visit to the battlefield of Culloden, I looked without success for an entry for Charles Edward Louis Philip Casimir Stuart, “Bonnie Prince Charlie”, and was also disappointed by the absence of Alexander Dalrymple, the Scottish geographer, hydrographer, and principal eighteenth century proponent of the existence of a great southern continent, and also by the failure of any librarian to make the right side at the cut‐off point. But no great quarrel could justifiably be mounted at the selection process or, for that matter, with the treatment those included receive from the 250 or so academic contributors.
Unhappily the same cannot be said of some of the bibliographies. For example, the ten books cited for Captain James Cook exclude both Sir Maurice Holmes’ Captain James Cook R.N. A Bibliographical Excursion (1952) and Bibliography of Captain James Cook R.N., F.R.S. Circumnavigator, edited by M.K. Beddie, and published by The Library of New South Wales in a second edition in 1970 to mark the bicentenary of Cook’s discovery of the eastern seaboard of Australia. A follow‐up comparison with the bibliography appended to the entry for Abel Janszoon Tasman elicits five citations which do not include Andrew Sharp’s The Voyage of Abel Janszoon Tasman (1969) or Gunter Schilder’s Australia Unveiled: The Share of the Dutch Navigators in the Discovery of Australia (1976). Faced with this sort of evidence, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, in the revision and reordering process, the bibliographies were not updated as carefully as they might have been. If this effectively reduces their research value, the ten projected volumes, when completed, will nevertheless be of immense use to public and higher education reference libraries, not least because of the skill with which the contributors present and interpret the known facts and weave them into a cogent and well‐polished narrative.
