A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university-a history major, no less!-he's reached middle age with a third-grader's grasp of early America. In fact, he's mislaid more than a century of American history, the period separating Columbus's landing in 1492 from the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 160-something. Did nothing happen in between?

Horwitz decides to find out, and in...