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By Simon Schama. (New York: Knopf, 1991. xiv + 333 pp. $21.00, ISBN 0-679-40213-6.)
Simon Schama's unusual book, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), offers narrative explorations of two violent deaths situated in the American past: the battlefield death of Gen. James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham in September 1759 and the murder of Dr. George Parkman at Harvard Medical College in November 1849, at the hands of his debtor, Professor John Webster. In telling these tales--an activity into which Schama plunges without introduction or framing device--he employs creative modes of multiple narration. The story of Wolfe is told variously through the eyewitness account of an ordinary British soldier at the Battle of Quebec, fragments of Wolfe family correspondence, the heroic mythologization of Wolfe by Benjamin West in his most famous painting The Death of General Wolfe (1770), and the obsessive identification with the general...