Explorers: A New History
Matthew Lockwood ’14PhD
W. W. Norton, $20.43
Reviewed by Hampton Sides ’84
Explorers have gotten a bad rap in recent years. Statues of once-celebrated pathfinders have been toppled. Obelisks of great navigators have been vandalized. For modern critics, exploration has come to be seen as a suspicious enterprise from the dark days of imperialism, an activity almost exclusively reserved for white males who sought riches and glory while working on behalf of rapacious colonial interests.
In Explorers: A New History, Matthew Lockwood ’14PhD aims to shatter this tired old paradigm. Lockwood expands our perception of exploration to include many lesser-known adventurers, as well as a host of important but largely anonymous individuals—often people of color—who were pushed into the shadows of discovery narratives. Here are African, Asian, and Arab explorers, Indigenous explorers, women explorers. Here are migrants who crossed vast oceans to seek a better life, and resourceful fugitives who traversed continents to escape the bonds of slavery.
Here are scouts, porters, guides, sherpas, and interpreters, finally given the credit they deserve. “The common image of the explorer,” writes Lockwood, “is of a man alone in the wilderness, boldly blazing new paths into the unknown. This picture of self-reliance is fantasy. Explorers relied on local knowledge and local muscle.”
Among many engaging examples, Lockwood considers the case of Sacagawea, who proved indispensable during the Lewis and Clark expedition; Matthew Henson, the unsung African American adventurer who accompanied Robert Peary to the North Pole; and the brilliant Polynesian priest and navigator Tupaia, who joined Captain James Cook’s first odyssey around the world. The lives of many ignored adventurers, Lockwood suggests, have become “casualties of time or the inequities of race and class.”
Today, in a time “when the earth is wrapped in waves and wires and mapped to the inch by GPS,” Lockwood concedes, “it might seem as though there is nothing left to discover.” But, he argues, exploration is still possible, even if frontiers may seem less obvious, more abstruse.
Having democratized exploration’s past, Lockwood imagines a more democratized future for this fundamental human impulse. “Exploration,” he concludes, “is for everyone who reaches beyond themselves with curiosity and imagination, who sets off into the unknown with a sense of wonder and a spirit of adventure.”
Hampton Sides ’84 is the author, most recently, of The Wide Wide Sea.
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Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
Anne Applebaum ’86
Doubleday, $27
Reviewed by David Greenberg ’90
Starting maybe fifteen years ago, after the 2008 global financial crisis, a novel strain of despotism began to flourish in countries from the Far East to the former Soviet Union to Latin America. Anne Applebaum ’86, a columnist and historian of totalitarianism, has emerged as one of our leading analysts of this new authoritarianism. In The Atlantic and in her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy, she examined these repressive regimes and the reasons that societies once thought resistant to illiberalism’s allure came to embrace it.
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World continues this investigation. Like Twilight of Democracy, this book is almost an extended essay, quite unlike her weighty histories of the Soviet gulag and the Holodomor. Her aim is to show how these autocracies, despite ideological differences (left vs. right, secular vs. theocratic) work together to undermine the liberal international order of human rights, law, and free traffic among nations that served humanity so well from 1945 until the current crisis.
Autocracy, Inc. is Applebaum’s coinage for the ad hoc alliance of regimes—from classic totalitarian states like North Korea to quasi-democratic yet increasingly unfree governments like those in Hungary and Turkey—whose political leaders and their kleptocratic cronies embrace authoritarianism to amass wealth and power. Led by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, they collaborate opportunistically to thwart their own people’s stirrings for freedom and the West’s efforts to uphold the liberal rules-based order. Applebaum introduces readers to the multifarious methods through which these autocracies support one another and subvert liberal democracy.
In the early years of globalization, the free flow of people, goods, and money helped liberal democracy advance around the world. But the autocrats learned to respond, and the tide has turned. Applebaum concludes with ideas about how the West can fight back—a fight, she argues, critical to the era that is only now unfolding.
David Greenberg ’90 is author of John Lewis: A Life.
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Shakespeare’s Sisters

Ramie Targoff ’89

Alfred A. Knopf
Reviewed by Kathrin Day Lassila ’81
With skill and expertise, Ramie Targoff ’89 has produced a book showing that, while the great male poets of the 1500s and 1600s are deeply admired for their work, many women’s poems—often neglected—were every bit as praiseworthy.
Consider the young Elizabeth I. In 1554, her sister Mary (who suspected treason) kept her under house arrest: no visitors, no paper, no ink. So Elizabeth took a piece of charcoal and wrote a poem on the window frame. Her shortest poem was probably the one she scratched on the glass with a diamond: “Much suspected by me / Nothing proved can be.” In 1563, she wrote a book of poems for prayer, thanking God that she had left prison safely. Targoff also reminds us how much Elizabeth, the “virgin queen,” longed for love: “I grieve and dare not show my discontent / I love and yet am forced to seem to hate.”
Of course, she wasn’t the only woman of her time who wrote. When Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, lost her brother, she began to edit and publish his works. That led her to write poems, and the poet Edmund Spenser encouraged her. “The Doleful Lay of Clorinda” was ostensibly by Spenser—but he introduced the poem as one written by “the gentlest shepherdess that lives this day.”
In 1613, another Elizabeth—Elizabeth Cary—published The Tragedy of Mariam. Targoff notes that it was “the first original play by a woman ever published in England.” Although women in those days were told to “obey, and cease from commanding, and perform subjection” to their husbands, Cary converted to Catholicism and her husband left her, but she kept writing almost until her death.
This is history at its best.
Kathrin Day Lassila ’81 is the former editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine.
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