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Is Christopher Columbus Polish? Or is this just polish-ed rhetoric? Apparently Christopher Columbus has a new identity: he’s Polish according to author Manuel Rosa in his newly-released book “Columbus: The Untold Story.” I have just 2 problems with Rosa’s conclusions: (1) there is no basis in actual fact; and (2) his writing is atrocious!
How do you convince me something is true? Present a cogent argument for something and lead me along a path of fact-laden stones and roses! How do you put someone off forever in trying to convince me something is true? Blind all my senses while walking down a path of landmines and thorns, while at the same time nagging me to death with a loudspeaker.
The second scenario is what Manuel Rosa’s book amounts to. It is complete and utter rhetorical dissonance; it is a masked attempt at scholarship and a lesson in why “nanny-nanny boo-boo” has never been counted among the wisdom of the sages.
Do I personally believe that Christopher Columbus could be the son of a Polish king? Ironically, yes.
However, Mr. Rosa could have condensed his 332 pages of Colón cancer into about 15. The whole book is a repetitive, whiny, pseudo-vengeful diatribe about ‘other’ scholars and fact-finders who apparently hurt his feelings and now he feels he’s bested them. The whole tone of this book is pejorative, petty, and maligning. It’s a bit ugly, if you ask me.
Somewhere along the way the author does manage to present a few facts, but a few chapters in of reading (if you can stomach it) will convince you that he has a problem letting go. Good grief, he repeats claims over and over like a middle-school tattle tale hawking over you while you’re into his book incessantly poking his finger into your arm. “Stop it, you psycho!” Or as I tell my dog: “drop it!”
For example, on page 223 Rosa writes: “Once an understanding is reached that the current story about an ignorant peasant wool weaver named Cristoforo Colombo is a fraud, it becomes much easier to find clues that prove that fraud.”
Then, on page 233 he repeats: “However, there is nothing in the documents that connects Admiral Colón to Italy, or the Genoese Colombo to the Spanish Admiral Colón.”
Like the ear-piercing, brain-jarring sound of audio feedback that literally rattles your cavities loose, Manuel Rosa repeatedly interjects the same mindless statements over and over at least 5 times in every chapter. They appear as incongruent strings of text surrounded by unrelated arguments – it’s like someone that keeps slapping you to see if you’re still paying attention. I think that type of torture has been outlawed by the Geneva Conventions.
To put it into perspective, Rosa introduces his anti-Colombo theory on page 70, the texts I quoted above were on pages 200 and beyond. There’s no break from the madness. It’s like the movie “Up!” where the dog keeps randomly shouting “Squirrel!!!” Hey man, make your point ONCE and then move on.
The truly grotesque part is that after blabbering on for 284 pages about how NOT Italian and wonderfully Portuguese Columbus was, Rosa finally reveals in Chapter 17 that Columbus actually wasn’t Portuguese at all!
Like Mugatu in the movie Zoolander exclaims: “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”
Columbus is, in theory, Polish. Manuel Rosa spends the first 5 chapters (not to mention a convoluted introduction) giving you a treatise on the history of Portugal and all of its maritime majesty, which, granted is ‘all that.’ He then spends the next 3 chapters telling you how he’s debunked the Columbus = Colombo Italian theory, which, granted, is hypothesizable. Rosa then takes you through EVERY SINGLE Columbus voyage and tells you how awesome the Portuguese were, through his own stellar hagiographic Rosa-colored lenses.
So, only after 284 pages of bloody and excruciating dental work does Dr. Rosa tell you that you never actually had a cavity at all! No, he’s just pissed off at all the other dentists out there and thought he’d take it out on your mouth!
In Chapter 17, the author reveals the fact that Christopher Columbus (Colón, aka ‘cheap Colón’) is in reality the son of a Polish king. Now that’s something worthy of Lieutenant Columbo! Ok, as I’ve said previously: I actually think there is merit to this theory, hence my excoriating review of Rosa’s work.
SO WHY ON EARTH DID ROSA SPEND 284 PAGES TELLING ME WHO COLUMBUS WASN’T? FFS TELL ME WHO HE WAS!!!
That is the part of this ill-begotten flaming piece of dung that I don’t understand. If your point is to re-center the Christopher Columbus theory around this son of a Polish king that escaped a battle and then secretly ran away to Portugal, then, hey, swell, tell me THAT story! I want to know everything about the history of Poland surrounding this time including the history of the Jagiełło Dynasty up until the Battle of Varna which occurred on November 10th, 1444. Then take me on the miraculous journey in which this king enters a new land, assumes a new identity and has a son who becomes one of the most famous figures in all of world history.
Manuel Rosa spends a whopping total of 41 pages telling us the TRUE story of Columbus. WTF, but that’s only 12% of the book, out of 332 pages.
Instead of telling us the story of Rocky Balboa in Philadelphia, Rosa tells us the story of Brad Pitt growing up in Shawnee, Oklahoma in order to illustrate what Rocky wasn’t using fiction to inform us about non-fiction. That’s looney bin crazy! This inept logic is patently ridiculous and I would even venture to say somewhat unscrupulous.
He’s so incessant with his anti-Italian thing that he even interjects at least twice (pages 300 & 312) his begrudging opinions in the final reveal. He just can’t let it go, can he? You had to take one last swipe at the Colombo theory, right? There are other prejudices that continue to bubble forth in his haphazard treatment of history.
At the end of it all, it’s not WHAT Manuel Rosa ultimately has to say, it’s HOW he says it. It’s a disjointed series of so-called ‘facts’ that Rosa himself even admits in the book are unsubstantiated. Even if I give him the benefit of the doubt and equate a single fact about Christopher Columbus to a metaphoric word, we would have the sentence: “here are all the facts.” Instead of Rosa clearly writing “here are all the facts,” he’s written: “l ht arhe cst felhera erehea.” Yeah, thanks dude, that made total sense.
The book “Columbus: The Untold Story” is a colossal waste of everything – it’s an “untold story” that should have remained an untold story. There is a beautiful and earth-shattering piece of scholarship waiting to be unveiled and Manuel Rosa completely missed the mark! Therein is the real travesty of this work.
Just when I thought I had nothing left to strip down about this book, I get up from my desk and walk over to my bookshelves to file this tawdry nonsense away for good, when alas, to my chagrin, I realize that not even the spine of this book is printed with proper perspective. Here, want to actually read a cool book on Christopher Columbus?
SOURCE: Rosa, Manuel. 2016. Columbus: The Untold Story. Garfield: Outwater.
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Pretty honest review, as far as the writing goes. Rosa’s book is in severe need of a good editor. However, the average reader cannot just be told Columbus was son of a Polish king, without giving them the background of Columbus history, Portugal’s hand in seafaring, and about the Battle of Varna. All in all, i give Rosa kudos for gathering all the information he did and for bringing so much new information never before tied to the history of Columbus.
I don’t think you understood that Rosa did not write this book about Columbus. To me the book is about a false story that was pushed on the public via the media at that time as well and the untold story of how “Columbus” and the Portuguese tricked Spain into accepting that America was India.
This to me is the real story that Rosa exposed here and that you may have missed.
I agree the writing needs editing but I believe this is due to the translation since the book was first published in Spanish as Colón, la historia nunca contada.
I believe history will sho Rosa to be correct in all his major points:
1- Columbus was not Italian nor was Columbus his true name
2- the 1492 voyage was a Portuguese ruse to push the Spanish west away from African trade and India spice trade
3- the Santa Maria never sank off the coast of Haiti but was marooned on purpose
4- the navigator was not a peasant but a nobleman whose identity has been hidden form us by the court chroniclers and by his family
All in all I give Rosa a 10 for effort, an 8 for making his point with documents and a 5 for the poor writing