I am now officially in the book-reviewing business for H-Net, and the image you see here is the cover of the first book I have reviewed.  Here is the link to the review itself, in case you’re interested.  This isn’t the sort of book you’ll be foisting on other people as a test of whether you and they can be friends, but it does do what it says it will do: it seeks to alter historians’ prior assumptions about Spain’s control of the Pacific Ocean as having been pervasive and pretty much unchallenged at least until it lost control of its colonies in most of the Americas.  Its prose is serviceable but, as I note in the review, its goal of appearing to have been written by one author (three authors are credited on the cover) gets undermined by some editorial choices, which caused me to become distracted by the question of just who was most responsible for what chapters.

As these reviews get published, I will also be posting links to them under the “Reviews” tab on the blog’s home page.