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The learning process is not an all-at-once thing. When we first learn something new, we tend to get a picture painted in broad strokes; then, as we become more and more familiar with a subject, we fill in finer and finer details. 1492: The Year the World Began is a filling-in of fine details. This may seem surprising to some people when thinking about the title of this book, because one of the biggest, broadest strokes of our cultural literacy is that Columbus “discovered�� America in 1492, and that started the ball rolling towards the domination of Western civilization from the 1500’s on up through the 20th century. I mean, if an American remembers any dates at all from grade school history, there’s a good chance 1492 will be one of them.

But Felipe Fernández-Armesto is not painting in broad strokes—this is a book about fine details, about subtle historic influences and oblique cause-and-effect. That is, the author—a history professor at Notre Dame University—posits that the modern world did indeed begin (inasmuch as a definite year can be pinpointed, which is an iffy proposition in and of itself) in the year 1492 C.E., but Columbus�� first voyage to the Western Hemisphere was just one reason why that year was so pivotal. Besides what was going on in Spain and in the rest of Western Europe, he also relates what was happening in the rest of the world as well: the Mediterranean rim and the Byzantine Empire; Africa; the rise of Islam; the Ottoman Turks; Italy in the Middle Ages; Russian and eastern Europe; China, Japan, and Korea, the Indian Ocean rim, and the Aztec and Inca “empires.�� In doing so, he addresses the question of why Western Europe, and not an African, Asian, or Meso-American culture, became the formidable engine of exploration and expansion. The answers are not the broad-stroke third grade ones of the “supremacy�� of European culture, but are much more nuanced. I am reminded of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which shares some of the same themes and some of the same answers as 1492.

I’m not sure I agree with all of Professor Fernández-Armesto’s conclusions, but after reading 1492: The Year the World Began, I feel smarter and possessed with more insight into the vast, varied, and random mechanisms that create a human history that is anything but inevitable.