Author : Rhys Isaac
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 489 pages
File Size : 39,14 MB
Release : 2005-09-29
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0195189086
In this long-awaited work, Isaac mines the diary of a Revolutionary War-era Virginia planter--and many other sources--to reconstruct his interior world as it plunged into turmoil.
Author : Rhys Isaac
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 489 pages
File Size : 36,94 MB
Release : 2005-09-29
Category : History
ISBN : 0199884986
Landon Carter, a Virginia planter, left behind one of the most revealing of all American diaries. In this astonishingly rich biography, Isaac mines this remarkable document--and many other sources--to reconstruct Carter's interior world as it plunged into revolution. The aging patriarch, though a fierce supporter of American liberty, was deeply troubled by the rebellion and its threat to established order. His diary, originally a record of plantation business, began to fill with angry stories of revolt in his own little kingdom. Carter writes at white heat, his words sputtering from his pen as he documents the terrible rupture that the Revolution meant to him. Indeed, Carter felt in his heart that he was chronicling a world in decline, the passing of the order that his revered father had bequeathed to him. Not only had Landon's king betrayed his subjects, but Landon's own household betrayed him: his son showed insolent defiance, his daughter Judith eloped with a forbidden suitor, all of his slaves conspired constantly, and eight of them made an armed exodus to freedom. The seismic upheaval he helped to start had crumbled the foundations of Carter's own home. In Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom Rhys Isaac unfolds not only the life, but also the mental world of our countrymen in a long-distant time. Moreover, in this presentation of Landon Carter's passionate narratives, the diarist becomes an arresting new character in the world's literature, a figure of Shakespearean proportions, the Lear of his own tragic kingdom. This long-awaited work will be seen both as a major contribution to Revolution history and a triumph of the art of biography.
Author : Mike Carter
Publisher : Random House
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 48,64 MB
Release : 2014-01-31
Category : Travel
ISBN : 1446491013
A broken heart and a moment of drunken bravado inspires middle-aged, and typically rather cautious, journalist Mike Carter to take off on a life-changing six month motorcycle trip around Europe. Never mind that he hadn't been on two wheels since an inglorious three-month teenage chapter involving a Lambretta, four crashes and an 18-month ban for drink-driving, a plan had begun to loosely form... And so, having completed a six day residential motorcycle course and hastily re-mortgaged his flat, Mike sets off alone, resolving to go wherever the road takes him and enjoy the adventure of heading off into the unknown. He ends up travelling almost 20,000 miles and reaching the four extremes of Europe: the Arctic Circle in the north, the Mediterranean coast in the south, the Portuguese Atlantic to the west and the Iraqi border of Turkey in the east. But really it's a journey inwards, as, on the way, Mike finds his post-divorce scars starting to heal and attempts to discover what he, as a man in his forties who hasn't quite found his place in the world, should be doing. Self-deprecating, poetic and utterly engaging, his is a heroic journey taken for the rest of us too scared to leave our 9 to 5 office-bound existence.
Author : Jessica Cluess
Publisher : Random House Books for Young Readers
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 47,33 MB
Release : 2016-09-20
Category : Young Adult Fiction
ISBN : 0553535927
"Vivid characters, terrifying monsters, and world building as deep and dark as the ocean." --Victoria Aveyard, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Red Queen I am Henrietta Howel. The first female sorcerer in hundreds of years. The prophesied one. Or am I? Henrietta Howel can burst into flames. Forced to reveal her power to save a friend, she's shocked when instead of being executed, she's invited to train as one of Her Majesty's royal sorcerers. Thrust into the glamour of Victorian London, Henrietta is declared the chosen one, the girl who will defeat the Ancients, bloodthirsty demons terrorizing humanity. She also meets her fellow sorcerer trainees, handsome young men eager to test her power and her heart. One will challenge her. One will fight for her. One will betray her. But Henrietta Howel is not the chosen one. As she plays a dangerous game of deception, she discovers that the sorcerers have their own secrets to protect. With battle looming, what does it mean to not be the one? And how much will she risk to save the city—and the one she loves? Exhilarating and gripping, Jessica Cluess's spellbinding fantasy introduces a powerful, unforgettably heroine, and a world filled with magic, romance, and betrayal. Hand to fans of Libba Bray, Sarah J. Maas, and Cassandra Clare. "The magic! The intrigue! The guys! We were sucked into this monster-ridden, alternative England from page one. Henrietta is literally a 'girl on fire' and this team of sorcerers training for battle had a pinch of Potter blended with a drop of [Cassandra Clare's] Infernal Devices." --Justine Magazine "Cluess gamely turns the chosen-one trope upside down in this smashing dark fantasy." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Unputdownable. I loved the monsters, the magic, and the teen warriors who are their world's best hope! Jessica Cluess is an awesome storyteller!" --Tamora Pierce, #1 New York Times bestselling author "A fun, inventive fantasy. I totally have a book crush on Rook." --Sarah Rees Brennan, New York Times bestselling author "Pure enchantment. I love how Cluess turned the 'chosen one' archetype on its head. With the emotional intensity of my favorite fantasy books, this is the kind of story that makes you forget yourself." --Roshani Chokshi, New York Times bestselling author of The Star-Touched Queen "A glorious, fast-paced romp of an adventure. Jessica Cluess has built her story out of my favorite ingredients: sorcery, demons, romance, and danger." --Kelly Link, author of Pretty Monsters
Author : Miranda Carter
Publisher : Farrar Straus & Giroux
Page : 590 pages
File Size : 30,25 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780374105310
Chronicles the life of art historian Sir Anthony Blunt, exploring his private and public personas and how he used his connections within English high society to work as a Soviet spy until he was exposed by Margaret Thatcher in 1979.
Author : Andrew Levy
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 32,66 MB
Release : 2007-01-09
Category : History
ISBN : 0375761047
“[Andrew Levy] brings a literary sensibility to the study of history, and has written a richly complex book, one that transcends Carter’s story to consider larger questions of individual morality and national memory.” –The New York Times Book Review In 1791, Robert Carter III, a pillar of Virginia’s Colonial aristocracy, broke with his peers by arranging the freedom of his nearly five hundred slaves. It would be the largest single act of liberation in the history of American slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite this courageous move–or perhaps because of it–Carter’s name has all but vanished from the annals of American history. In this haunting, brilliantly original work, Andrew Levy explores the confluence of circumstance, conviction, war, and emotion that led to Carter’s extraordinary act. As Levy points out, Carter was not the only humane master, nor the sole partisan of emancipation, in that freedom-loving age. So why did he dare to do what other visionary slave owners only dreamed of? In answering this question, Levy reveals the unspoken passions that divided Carter from others of his class, and the religious conversion that enabled him to see his black slaves in a new light. Drawing on years of painstaking research and written with grace and fire, The First Emancipator is an astonishing, challenging, and ultimately inspiring book. “A vivid narrative of the future emancipator’s evolution.” –The Washington Post Book World “Highly recommended . . . a truly remarkable story about an eccentric American hero and visionary . . . should be standard reading for anyone with an interest in American history.” –Library Journal (starred review) “Absorbing. . . Well researched and thoroughly fascinating, this forgotten history will appeal to readers interested in the complexities of American slavery.” –Booklist (starred review)
Author : Terri L. Snyder
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 28,68 MB
Release : 2015-08-28
Category : History
ISBN : 022628073X
“[A] well-written exploration of the cultural and legal meanings of slave suicide in British North America . . . far-reaching, compelling, and relevant.” —Choice The history of slavery in early America is a history of suicide. On ships crossing the Atlantic, enslaved men and women refused to eat or leaped into the ocean. They strangled or hanged themselves. They tore open their own throats. In America, they jumped into rivers or out of windows, or even ran into burning buildings. Faced with the reality of enslavement, countless Africans chose death instead. In The Power to Die, Terri L. Snyder excavates the history of slave suicide, returning it to its central place in early American history. How did people—traders, plantation owners, and, most importantly, enslaved men and women themselves—view and understand these deaths, and how did they affect understandings of the institution of slavery then and now? Snyder draws on an array of sources, including ships’ logs, surgeons’ journals, judicial and legislative records, newspaper accounts, abolitionist propaganda and slave narratives to detail the ways in which suicide exposed the contradictions of slavery, serving as a powerful indictment that resonated throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world and continues to speak to historians today.
Author : Kevin R. C. Gutzman
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 30,21 MB
Release : 2017-01-31
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1250010802
"In this lively and clearly written book, Kevin Gutzman makes a compelling case for the broad range and radical ambitions of Thomas Jefferson's commitment to human equality." - Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize winning author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 Though remembered chiefly as author of the Declaration of Independence and the president under whom the Louisiana Purchase was effected, Thomas Jefferson was a true revolutionary in the way he thought about the size and reach of government, which Americans who were full citizens and the role of education in the new country. In his new book, Kevin Gutzman gives readers a new view of Jefferson—a revolutionary who effected radical change in a growing country. Jefferson’s philosophy about the size and power of the federal system almost completely undergirded the Jeffersonian Republican Party. His forceful advocacy of religious freedom was not far behind, as were attempts to incorporate Native Americans into American society. His establishment of the University of Virginia might be one of the most important markers of the man’s abilities and character. He was not without flaws. While he argued for the assimilation of Native Americans into society, he did not assume the same for Africans being held in slavery while—at the same time—insisting that slavery should cease to exist. Many still accuse Jefferson of hypocrisy on the ground that he both held that “all men are created equal” and held men as slaves. Jefferson’s true character, though, is more complex than that as Kevin Gutzman shows in his new book about Jefferson, a revolutionary whose accomplishments went far beyond the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.
Author : Jimmy Carter
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 33,62 MB
Release : 2001-10-16
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780743211994
Jimmy Carter re-creates his boyhood on a Georgia farm.
Author : Ted Lewis
Publisher : Soho Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 42,57 MB
Release : 2014-11-04
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1616955074
With an Afterword by Nick Triplow Published in North America for the first time—the final novel featuring Jack Carter (Get Carter, Jack Carter’s Law) has London’s slickest operator journeying to a Spanish villa to protect a wise-cracking Italian-American mobster. Jack Carter is not thrilled when his frustratingly unprofessional employers—London mob kingpins Gerald and Les Fletcher—force him to take a vacation. Jack doesn’t like leaving the business in other people’s hands, but the company villa in Spain promises sunshine and some time to plot his next move. Jack soon finds he is on anything but a vacation. The villa is already inhabited by a cowardly house steward and a knuckle-dragging American gangster. Jack has apparently been sent to protect the American, who has turned informant. There are few things that Jack Carter hates more than surprises. Informants being chief among them.
