"I started writing The Sparrow in 1992, which was the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the New World. That year, there was a lot of historical revisionism going on, condemning the Europeans for their terrible sins and mistakes, as though they had set out from Spain intending to wreck Indian cultures and destroy whole populations. I thought, "Wait a minute here--those guys have been dead for 470 years! It's just not fair to hold them to standards of cultural sensitivity and appreciation for diversity that we only pay lip-service to at the end of the 20th century."
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Date: 2023-10-23 11:26 pm (UTC)"I started writing The Sparrow in 1992, which was the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the New World. That year, there was a lot of historical revisionism going on, condemning the Europeans for their terrible sins and mistakes, as though they had set out from Spain intending to wreck Indian cultures and destroy whole populations. I thought, "Wait a minute here--those guys have been dead for 470 years! It's just not fair to hold them to standards of cultural sensitivity and appreciation for diversity that we only pay lip-service to at the end of the 20th century."