Publication date: 2006-11-06
Dewey code: 709
RRP: £24.95
Price: £13.45
Review Turner in His Time / Thames & Hudson Ltd:
Edition: Reprint
Publication date: 2007-05-08
Dewey code: 973
RRP: £10.76
Price: £6.37
Review The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope / Simon & Schuster:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2003-07-03
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £8.99
Price: £1.16
Review Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self / Penguin:Claire Tomalin was born to write a biography of Samuel Pepys. Her previously acclaimed biographies of Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft have defined her as a scrupulous biographer who establishes a unique empathy with her subjects. In Pepys Tomalin has found her perfect subject, a man who is "both the most ordinary and the most extraordinary writer you will ever meet". Pepys wrote his diary throughout the 1660s, "a period as intellectually thrilling as it was dangerous and bloody", and Tomalin's book vividly brings to life the tumultuous world of 17-century London, where Pepys grew up. Pepys' life spanned the execution of one king and the restoration of another, and Tomalin elegantly recreates both Pepys' public and private lives. From his early days in London and then Cambridge, Tomalin pieces together the crucial years when "the private Samuel Pepys began to develop and yearn". She chronicles his rise through the bureaucracy of the restored king, Charles II, to his position as energetic reformer of the navy and successful husband to his vivacious, mercurial wife Elizabeth. But the book also deals with Pepy's personal tragedies, his struggle to secure patronage as a commoner, his frank and hilarious extra-marital exploits, and the cataclysmic Fire of London in 1666. This is a fine biography of an extraordinary man who "found the energy and commitment to create a new literary form" while also coming across as a generous, likeable, flawed human being. Tomalin's admiration for her subject is infectious, and will ensure that her biography becomes the standard reference for anyone interested in both Pepys's life and his art. [+]-Jerry Brotton.
Creator: Anne Mallinson
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 1998-11-16
RRP: £7.95
Price: £4.95
Review Heatherley: The Lost Sequel to "Lark Rise to Candleford" / John Owen Smith:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 1998-01-03
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.93
Review Blake / Vintage:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2000-06-01
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £8.99
Price: £2.69
Review The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream / Penguin:On Good Friday in 1914, a young British Army officer named Stewart Gore-Browne first glimpsed a lake in what was then Northern Rhodesia that the local Bemba tribe called Shiwa Ngandu ("Lake of the Royal Crocodiles"). At that moment, a love affair began which would last his lifetime, as the enraptured Gore-Browne set about creating a very British idyll in the African bush, complete with redbrick house and a terrace on which uniformed staff would serve champagne and cocktails. This is the complicated story of a man, his colonial vision, and the burden it became, set against the country in which he battles to realise it. Christina Lamb has assembled the story from the mass of diaries and correspondence that lay within the now crumbling and neglected house. It is an extraordinary tale that leaps off the page with the grace of a springbok. Gore-Browne initially appears an extinct species, all Harrovian vowels, and prone to pepper with lead shot anything that moves. He is, however, infused with a liberal, humane streak that leads him in later life to support Kenneth Kaunda and the UNIP in their fight for power. Indeed, Kaunda said of him, ". [+]he [Gore-Browne] was born an English gentleman, and died a Zambian gentleman". Gore-Browne's personal life progressed from an unrequited love to a dramatic marriage, while still indulging in a formidably passionate correspondence with a favourite aunt. There are times when you wish for a timely swipe of the novelist's pen, but it is the nature of this beast that questions remain unanswered; what holds this engrossing chronicle in place is the Africa House itself, and the lives that unfold in and around it, perched incongruously as it is in a country that has outgrown it. -David Vincent.
Publication date: 2008-07-01
RRP: £17.99
Price: £9.92
Review Doris Day: Reluctant Star / JR Books Ltd:
Publication date: 2008-07-07
Dewey code: 364.660922
RRP: £7.99
Price: £2.94
Review Pierrepoint - A Family of Executioners / John Blake Publishing Ltd:
Publication date: 2005-10-20
Dewey code: 940.542147
RRP: £19.99
Price: £10.71
Review Sniper on the Eastern Front: The Memoirs of Sepp Allerberger, Knight's Cross / Leo Cooper Ltd:
Authors
- Ewen Southby-Tailyour
- Andre Hue
Publication date: 2005-03-31
Dewey code: 940.548644092
RRP: £8.99
Price: £3.65
Review The Next Moon: The Remarkable True Story of a British Agent Behind the Lines in Wartime France / Penguin:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2002-07-15
Dewey code: 359
RRP: £7.99
Price: £4.26
Review Pirates: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates / Conway Maritime Press Ltd:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2002-07-04
Dewey code: 551
RRP: £8.99
Price: £1.23
Review The Map That Changed the World: A Tale of Rocks, Ruin and Redemption / Penguin:Simon Winchester has a very simple formula, of which The Map That Changed the World is a perfect example-namely that the history we have forgotten is infinitely more interesting than the history with which we are all familiar. After the success of The Surgeon of Crowthorne, which documented the life of WC Minor, the American surgeon and major contributor to the first Oxford English Dictionary, Winchester now turns his attention to William Smith, the 19th-century Briton who can justly lay claim to being the founding father of geology. The book has all the usual attributes of a pacy historical read: a self-educated, unrecognised scientist spends years roaming the British countryside, compiling a map of the geological layers beneath the surface, only to have his ideas ripped off and to wind up homeless and penniless in Yorkshire with a wife who is going bonkers. And it gets better: in a bizarre Dickensian twist, Smith finally gets his just accolades when he is recognised by a kindly liberal nobleman and is reintroduced to London society as the geologist par excellence. Of itself, the story would be more than enough recommendation but there is a subtext running though the book that is in many ways just as compelling-namely, how some parts of history get written in stone and others in dust. Most secondary-school students get to learn of Charles Darwin and The Voyage of the Beagle. Yet how many people could stick their hands up and say they had heard of Smith? But is evolution any more important a field as geology? Is history ultimately an exercise in who has the best PR? Winchester may not have the answer, but he'll certainly make you think. -John Crace.
Authors
- Oscar Zarate
- Richard Appignanesi
Dewey code: 609
RRP: £6.11
Price: £3.29
Review Freud for Beginners / Pantheon Books:
Authors
- Jean Ritchie
- Barbie Probert-Wright
Dewey code: 940.53161
RRP: £6.99
Price: £0.79
Review Little Girl Lost (Richard & Judy's True) / Arrow Books Ltd:
Edition: Reissue
Publication date: 2001-09-27
Dewey code: 943
RRP: £10.99
Price: £4.00
Review The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich / Oxford Paperbacks:Before writing Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris the first volume of his substantial biography of Adolf Hitler, Ian Kershaw focused on the popular appeal of the Nazi dictator in The Hitler Myth. Arguing that "the sources of Hitler's appeal must be sought. in those who adored him, rather than in the leader himself," Kershaw shows how Hitler's public image welded together antagonistic forces within the Nazi state, mobilised the nation for war, and contributed to the ethos that animated systematic and genocidal violence. Responding to historians who maintain that Hitler's personality or ideological fixations accounted for his broad acceptance, Kershaw argues that, in the early 1930s a sizeable plurality of Germans hungered for an omnipotent Führer to stand above the political disharmonies of the Weimar state. Later, foriegn policy and military victories attracted many more to the Hitler legend. However, victories were the price for popularity; and Hitler became more and more bloodthirsty as both his image and regime foundered under the blows of the Allied powers. The Hitler myth, then-a cultural phenomenon the Reich Minister Joeseph Goebbels claimed as his greatest propaganda triumph-became a fundamental cause for the collapse of the Nazi State. Kershaw's authoritative history of political culture in Hitler's Germany forcefully demonstrates that the Führer's popularity rested less on "bizarre and arcane precepts of Nazi ideology, than on social and political values. [+]recognisable in many societies other than the Third Reich. " In our present political environment, which repeatedly features outcries for "leadership" from pundits and public servants alike, the disturbing lessons of The Hitler Myth are an urgent warning. -James Highfill.
Publication date: 2008-10-02
RRP: £8.99
Price: £3.67
Review Jennie Churchill: Winston's American Mother / John Murray:
Publication date: 2008-05-06
RRP: £14.99
Price: £6.99
Review Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood / Bloomsbury Publishing PLC:
Publication date: 2007-04-05
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.86
Review In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I / Robinson Publishing:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-02-03
Dewey code: 320
RRP: £9.99
Price: £3.22
Review Wellington: The Iron Duke / HarperCollins Publishers Ltd:We associate Wellington so much with the battle of Waterloo that it's easy to forget that, before the battle, he had had a long military career already and that, after it, he had an even longer career as politician, prime minister and pillar of the establishment. Richard Holmes's admirably clear and succinct biography of the Duke has a chapter on his youth as a slightly awkward loner from the Anglo-Irish nobility and a concluding chapter which races swiftly through the 37 years of his post-Waterloo life. However the bulk of the book, unsurprisingly, is given over to a description and analysis of his military exploits. As viewers of his TV series and readers of his previous books will know, Holmes is a brilliant interpreter of battlefields and what took place on them. He has visited most of the sites of Wellington's battles, not only those in Europe but those in India where the young Arthur Wellesley, as he then was, gained his first experiences as a general. (Wellington himself, in later life, claimed that his finest military achievement was not Waterloo but the winning of the Battle of Assaye during the Maratha Wars in 1803. ) He uses his knowledge of the battle sites and his familiarity with all the extensive literature on the Peninsular War and Waterloo to produce a vivid account of Wellington's string of successes as a general. As the quotes in this book from his writings and despatches show, Wellington had a gift for the striking phrase and for concise description of complicated events. It's a gift his biographer shares and Holmes has produced a very readable and enjoyable book. -Nick Rennison.
Publication date: 2006-03-08
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £10.95
Price: £5.24
Review Enemy Coast Ahead Uncensored: The Real Guy Gibson / Crecy Publishing:
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Models & Brands:
Turner in His Time, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Heatherley: The Lost Sequel to "Lark Rise to Candleford", Blake, The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream, Doris Day: Reluctant Star, Pierrepoint - A Family of Executioners, Sniper on the Eastern Front: The Memoirs of Sepp Allerberger, Knight's Cross, The Next Moon: The Remarkable True Story of a British Agent Behind the Lines in Wartime France, Pirates: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, The Map That Changed the World: A Tale of Rocks, Ruin and Redemption, Freud for Beginners, Little Girl Lost (Richard & Judy's True), The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, Jennie Churchill: Winston's American Mother, Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood, In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I, Wellington: The Iron Duke, Enemy Coast Ahead Uncensored: The Real Guy Gibson |
