Books: The Great Enterprise

ADMIRAL OF THE OCEAN SEA-Samuet Eliot Morison-Atlantic-Little, Brown ($10).

This monumental, two-volume,* 874-page biography, which took ten years to complete, is the definitive job on Columbus. It warps the U.S. mind a little tighter to its neglected Spanish-American heritage, and presents the most complete picture yet published of the one historical figure about whom every American knows something. That something, says Historian Morison, is usually wrong.

Nobody, for example, really knows what Columbus looked like. There are at least 71 "alleged original portraits" in existence. Since no two look alike, Author Morison prefers...

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