Peter Charles Hoffer | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Peter Charles Hoffer | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York. By Donna Merwick. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. xviii, 281 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8014-3608-7.)

Most often in my experience, when a book review is hard to write, the author of the book fails to accomplish what she or he sets out to do. This was a hard book review to write for the opposite reason: it is almost impossible in five hundred words to do justice to the descriptive richness and narrative sophistication of Donna Merwick's Death of a Notary. On the surface, little happens. Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam, an old man worn out in the daily grind of making a living, denied the status and remuneration of notary and teacher that had been his in the Dutch colony of New Netherland after its conquest by the English (en passant: enjoy the wonderfully understated way Merwick shows us just how cunning and avaricious was Robert Livingston, the progenitor of the family fortunes in New York), commits suicide. 1

The subtlety with which Merwick paints European Dutch cities and the colonie (the analogy to a canvas is necessary, for Merwick loves pictorial details and has rescued many of them from Dutch and English records) cannot be conveyed in a book review. In a thousand ways she has brought Adriaen and his father Jan to life and reminded us of how a way of life based on Dutch language, law, and customs in Albany, as in the rest of the colony, flourished and declined. . . .

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