An experiment in historical narration: two true "tales"--Each involving a violent death, each linked to a great, tragic Boston dynasty, that of General James Wolfe, killed at the battle of Quebec in 1759 and the second, the death of George Parkman, eccentric Boston luminary. Both tales are linked by the fate of the dynasty of the Parkmans of Boston and by Schama's sense of the irrecoverable distance between events and their narration, of the death of certainty--Jacket.