James Dunkerley’s prodigious and unprecedented new book opens with three epigraphs, each addressed to a different dedicatee. One, in English replete with sexual imagery, evokes New Orleans, which is a minor setting of the book. The others are in untranslated Welsh and Quechua. You may not be able to understand the epigraphs, but you get their message at once: proceed at your peril.
This book is self-branded as a work of art, not merely of scholarship; of adventure, not of mere improvement. Dunkerley told colleagues that “they weren’t going to get a secure and sensible supplement to the scholarly corpus” (p. 622). Has any academic ever recommended his work on such grounds before? It sounds, at first, like a grand-scale captatio benevolentiae. At 642 pages and nearly 1,400 footnotes, the book looks—if not secure and sensible—at least solid and substantial. Every page is alive with evidence of the depth...
