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Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York. By Donna Merwick. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. xviii, 281 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8014-3608-7.)
Most often in my experience, when a book review is hard to write, the author of the book fails to accomplish what she or he sets out to do. This was a hard book review to write for the opposite reason: it is almost impossible in five hundred words to do justice to the descriptive richness and narrative sophistication of Donna Merwick's Death of a Notary. On the surface, little happens. Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam, an old man worn out in the daily grind of making a living, denied the status and remuneration of notary and teacher that had been his in the Dutch colony of New Netherland after its conquest by the English (en passant: enjoy the wonderfully understated way Merwick shows us just how cunning and avaricious was Robert Livingston, the progenitor of the family fortunes in New York), commits suicide.
The subtlety with which Merwick paints European Dutch cities and the...