"An infinitely beguiling book...a mind-teasing delight...Schama brings to bear an immense array of narrative
elements."
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Intriguing and provocative... Dead Certainties inspires us throughout to examine our own assumptions about
history and fiction"
-- Newsday
"A virtuoso performance... in Schama's hands the past loses its remoteness and takes on the noise and clutter
of experience....He has become one of the few contemporary historians who are read as much for themselves as for
their subjects."
-- Andrew Delbanco, New Republic
Random House, Inc. Web Site, January, 2002
Summary
History as inquest. Schama reconstructs- and at time reinvents- the death of General James Wolfe in 1759 at
the battle of Quebec and the 1849 murder of George Parkman, whose nephew would become Wolfe's greatest biographer.
