Compass of the Old World

Strong pick for readers of maritime history, museum studies, or global trade courses who appreciate material culture alongside political context. Works well in units on portolan charts and Indian Ocean networks; assign selected chapters with primary sources or map facsimiles. Notes on suitability: brief references to colonial violence and shipwrecks, non-graphic; footnotes are dense but the main narrative is clear. Conservation-minded students will connect with the Lisbon passages featuring a young practitioner.

I finished this feeling talked at rather than guided. The compass here becomes a podium, and the speech rarely ends.

Enough with the moralizing.

The conversations with the conservator could have been electric, but they read as staged set pieces, endlessly circling the same point about ownership without offering anything sharper than heavy sighs. Every time the needle appears, we are yanked back into a familiar lecture about guilt instead of getting clearer on how people actually used it.

The journey keeps ping-ponging: Lampedusa to Mombasa to Lisbon to Recife, and yet the scenes feel thin, as if the places are there to prop up an argument already settled. I wanted depth in a single harbor or workshop, not a skim across every shoreline.

If you want mechanics, you get gestures; if you want politics, you get sermons; if you want history, you get mood. By the final page I wasn't oriented at all, just exhausted.

Mais do que uma história de técnica, este livro é um mapa sensorial: cheiros de madeira e ferrugem no Torre do Tombo, vento salgado em Lampedusa, pó de oficinas de portulanos. Segui Radcliffe de Quanzhou a Mombaça, de Ribeira das Naus a uma sala de aula em Recife, e cada lugar ganha corpo através dos objetos - bússolas de água, caixas cardânicas, cartas manuseadas até esgarçar.

Radcliffe arranges his material like a set of bearings, alternating archival scenes in Lisbon with fieldwork from Quanzhou to Kilwa, so the chapters click into place without losing momentum. His attention to craft - the gimbaled box, the rosewood cracking, the portolan vellum under a stylus - gives the prose a tactile charge.

A few refrains about custodianship circle back once too often, but the braided structure holds: science, biography, and the archive keep returning to each other as reliably as a needle to north.

I came for a tight history; the narrative sprawls.

• Dense chapter openings
• Repeated detours into memory theory
• Brilliant glimpse of Majorcan workshops
• Thin engagement with Islamic navigational texts beyond Ibn Majid
• Maps reproduced too small

Radcliffe keeps asking what direction costs and who pays it, threading empire, trade, and memory into one line of bearing. The recurring question of custody and debt lands hardest in the scenes with Mateus Andrade, where conservation becomes argument; the compass is never neutral.

By the end, the book persuades me that our talent for navigation was also a talent for conquest, and that we still live inside its aftershocks. The final image crystallizes the theme of "trusting a sliver of iron to find our way" and then challenges it.