Dear Mr. Shorto:
Trademark your name; I will drink any chocolate milk called Shorto.
As for your enlightening, lugubrious history of New Amsterdam—Manhattan--I was disturbed for the following reasons:
It gave me a creepy case of the academics. I did not like slogging through a book. I wanted to feel as if I were in Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back machine; the thrill I got from Jack Finney’s Time And Again (yes, a novel, and the setting was 200 years after yours). I wanted to smell the forest as Adrien Van der Donck—your well-chosen, long-forgotten hero--hiked to his pow-wow with Indians. I wanted to taste New Amsterdam before docks obscured rocks. I wanted to smell fireplaces and listen to church hymns and gossip in the street. You gave me some of that, but mostly you gave me a stiff, overly chronological tour of events from Henry Hudson’s voyage (the mutiny that doomed him, by the way, was the best part of the book) to the English takeover. Interesting, yes. Informative, yup. Thought-provoking, at times. Admirable, of course. Involving—not as much as I would have liked. Somehow, even as you painted Van der Donck arguing his case against the Dutch West India Company, you didn’t quite bring Holland to life.
I also had trouble with those Dutch immigrants. What, aside from money, compelled them to pack up their lives for a dangerous cross-ocean voyage and a muddy village? After reading your fine book, I still don’t know.
Can you tell, Mr. Shorto, by my polite, quasi-professorial tone that Island at the Center of the World is not my idea of a beach book? That if your book were a girl, she’d win my respect, but not my lust?
Granted, your book is mainly about the struggle between Van der Donck and Peter Stuyvesant, and later the English and Peter Stuyvesant, to control the future of Manhattan and thus America. Still, I longed for some of what T.C. Boyle gave me in World’s End. Boyle’s characters were huge, frightening, fascinating Dutchmen decked in fantastic togs, outrageous personalities, absurd situations. Your Stuyvesant and Van der Donck were, by contrast, respectively, constipated and choir-boyish.
Worse, by the end of the book, I didn’t feel smarter.