Dead Certainies : (Unwarranted Speculations)

This book goes beyond more conventional histories to address the deeper enigmas that confront a student of the past. In order to do so, the author reconstructs--and at times reinvents--two ambiguous deaths: the first, that of General James Wolfe at the battle of Quebec in 1759; the second, in 1849, that of George Parkman, an eccentric Boston brahmin whose murder by an impecunious Harvard professor in 1849 was a grisly reproach to the moral sanctity of his society. Out of these stories--with all of their bizarre coincidences and contradictions--the author creates a vital work of historical imagination.