 A Conspiracy of Paper
By David Liss Random House ISBN: 0375502920 Description: Benjamin Weaver is an outsider in eighteenth-century London: a Jew among Christians; a ruffian among aristocrats; a retired pugilist who, hired by London’s gentry, travels through the criminal underworld in pursuit of debtors and thieves. In A Conspiracy of Paper, Weaver investigates a crime of the most personal sort: the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stockjobber. To find the answers, Weaver must contend with a desperate prostitute who knows too much about his past, relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish faith, and a cabal of powerful men in the world of British finance who have hidden their business dealings behind an intricate web of deception and violence. Relying on brains and brawn, Weaver uncovers the beginnings of a strange new economic order based on stock speculation--a way of life that poses great risk for investors but real danger for Weaver and his family. In the tradition of The Alienist and written with scholarly attention to period detail, A Conspiracy of Paper is one of the wittiest and most suspenseful historical novels in recent memory, as well as a perceptive and beguiling depiction of the origin of today’s financial markets. In Benjamin Weaver, author David Liss has created an irresistibly appealing protagonist, one who parlays his knowledge of the emerging stock market into a new kind of detective work. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Dawn on a Distant Shore
By Sara Donati Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub. ISBN: 0553107488 Description: Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner have settled into their life together at the edge of the New-York wilderness in the winter of 1794 when Elizabeth gives birth to healthy twins. But soon the events in Canada draw Nathaniel far away from his new family. Word has reached them that Nathaniel’s father has been arrested by crown officials in British Canada. Nathaniel reluctantly leaves Hidden Wolf Mountain to set out for the distant city, determined to see his father freed. Instead Nathaniel is imprisoned and finds himself in imminent danger of being hanged as an American spy. In a desperate bid to save her husband, Elizabeth bundles her infants and sets out on the long trek to Montreal. Accompanied by her stepdaughter, Hannah, their wise friend Curiosity Freeman, and Runs-from-Bears, a Mohawk warrior and lifelong friend of Nathaniel’s, Elizabeth journeys through the snowy wilderness and across treacherous waterways. But she soon discovers that freeing Nathaniel will take every ounce of her courage and inventiveness. It is a struggle that threatens her with the loss of what she loves most: her children. Torn apart, the Bonners must embark on yet another perilous voyage...this time all the way across the ocean to the heart of Scotland, where a wealthy earl claims kinship with Nathaniel’s father, Hawkeye. In his heart, the Mahican tribe of Hawkeye’s youth is the truest kin he will ever know, just as Nathaniel will always remain loyal to the Mohawk nation. But with this journey a whole new world opens up to Nathaniel and Elizabeth--and a destiny they could never have imagined awaits them.... Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Gates of Fire : An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
By Steven Pressfield Bantam Books ISBN: 0553580531 Description: The national bestseller! At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army. Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history--one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale.... Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 In the Wind’s Eye
By Charlotte Boyett-Compo DLSIJ Press ISBN: 1928973108 Description: Captain Sinclair McGregor has spent two years in the frozen hell of a Yankee prison camp. His life as he once knew it has been destroyed by the War. Returning home to Savannah to find his fiancee married to his worst enemy and his ancestral home sold for back taxes to the same man, he knows a despair darker than the depths of the Abyss. His life in shambles, his heart broken, with no money or possessions to his name, he is forced to move in with the grandmother who had raised him: a woman who abused him as a child and despises him as a man. If Sinclair cannot take back the family mansion, she would rather see him dead and sets into motion a plan to have her wishes carried out. But no one counted on the love of four uniquely different women who band together to save Sinclair McGregor’s life and soul. Will they be successful...or will the ugly hatred of a bitter old woman condemn him to a final hell? Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Scandalmonger : A Novel
By William Safire Simon & Schuster ISBN: 0684867192 Description: A presidential hopeful has taken a beautiful, vulnerable woman as his mistress, though both are married to others. His rival for the presidency of the United States has even more sensational secrets to guard about his own past. An ambitious journalist unearths the stories of the private lives of both, and he hefts in his hand what he calls “the hammer of truth.” The time is the end of the eighteenth century. The political figures whose intimate lives are about to be revealed are Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. The journalist out to shape the course of the young nation’s history is “that scurrilous scoundrel Callender,” the fugitive from Scottish sedition law who pioneered the public exposure of men in power. The women he makes famous are the mysterious Maria Reynolds and the slave Sally Hemings. The novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Safire brings these real characters in our history to life. He recounts the dramatic clash of the Founders and the first journalists--drawn from actual events of the nation’s beginnings--that has special relevance for our time. Scandalmonger is dramatized history at its best and presidential politics at its most fascinating. For those who think that Washington sex scandals and lurid journalism are recent developments, this novel will be a revelation, for Safire shows vividly how media intrusiveness into private lives--and politicians’ cool manipulation of the press--are as old as the Constitution. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 The Stone Maiden
By Susan King Signet ISBN: 0451199707 Description: In this first of a trilogy inspired by great Scottish legends, a woman saves her Highland clan by answering to the call of war--and the promise of a magical love.... Susan King... “...evokes the people and land of Scotland.”--Romantic Times “...is destined to be one of the superstars of historical romance.”--Romance Fiction Forum “...entrances the reader with the days of yore. Her books will stand the test of time.”--Affaire de Coeur Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Two Moons
By Thomas Mallon Pantheon Books ISBN: 0375400257 Description: Astronomy, politics, and romance join forces in this novel from the writer John Updike has called “one of the most interesting American novelists at work.” It’s the spring of 1877 in Washington, D.C., and at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Hugh Allison has conceived a secret ambition: to project an image through time and space. But his plan takes on urgent life only when the mathematically gifted Cynthia May enters his orbit as one of the observatory’s human “computers.” A Civil War widow whose beauty has been shadowed by worry and poverty, Cynthia reluctantly falls in love with the younger Hugh, who missed the war that has haunted her life. But the fate of their love affair--and of Hugh’s heavenly vision--may be out of their hands, decided instead by an astrologer and by the actions of a dangerously magnetic politician who wields his power over a Senate convulsed by Reconstruction and a wildly disputed presidential election. Masterfully combining historical detail and startling invention, Thomas Mallon gives us a galvanizing story of earthly heartbreak and otherworldly triumph. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Ben-Hur
By Lew Wallace Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192831992 Description: Historical novel by Lewis Wallace, published in 1880 and widely translated. It depicts the oppressive Roman occupation of ancient Palestine and the origins of Christianity. The Jew Judah Ben-Hur is wrongly accused by his former friend, the Roman Messala, of attempting to kill a Roman official. He is sent to be a slave and his mother and sister are imprisoned. Years later he returns, wins a chariot race against Messala, and is reunited with his now leprous mother and sister. Mother and daughter are cured on the day of the Crucifixion, and the family is converted to Christianity. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Drums Along the Mohawk
By Walter D. Edmonds Syracuse University Press ISBN: 0815604572 Description: As the war rages through the Mohawk Valley, newlyweds Gilbert and Lana Martin must arm themselves with knife and musket and face a powerful alliance of green-coated Tories, British regulars, and the Iroquois. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 The Killer Angels
By Michael Shaara Random House ISBN: 0679425411 Description: A sweeping journey to the heart of a country sundered by war--a dramatic and unforgettable novel that brings to life the Battle of Gettysburg. Winner of The Pulitzer Prize and basis for the TNT Movie Gettysburg. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Lincoln
By Gore Vidal Vintage Books ISBN: 0375708766 Description: In Lincoln, Vidal satisfies his lifelong interest in our sixteenth President by examining the four years of his presidency, the most turbulent in American history, through the eyes of those around him. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Crucible of War : The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766
By Fred Anderson Knopf ISBN: 0375406425 Description: In this engrossing narrative of the great military conflagration of the mid-eighteenth century, Fred Anderson transports us into the maelstrom of international rivalries. With the Seven Years’ War, Great Britain decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean--and in the process destroyed an American diplomatic system in which Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role--permanently changing the political and cultural landscape of North America. Anderson skillfully reveals the clash of inherited perceptions the war created when it gave thousands of American colonists their first experience of real Englishmen and introduced them to the British cultural and class system. We see colonists who assumed that they were partners in the empire encountering British officers who regarded them as subordinates and who treated them accordingly. This laid the groundwork in shared experience for a common view of the world, of the empire, and of the men who had once been their masters. Thus, Anderson shows, the war taught George Washington and other provincials profound emotional lessons, as well as giving them practical instruction in how to be soldiers. Depicting the subsequent British efforts to reform the empire and American resistance--the riots of the Stamp Act crisis and the nearly simultaneous pan-Indian insurrection called Pontiac’s Rebellion--as postwar developments rather than as an anticipation of the national independence that no one knew lay ahead (or even desired), Anderson re-creates the perspectives through which contemporaries saw events unfold while they tried to preserve imperial relationships. Interweaving stories of kings and imperial officers with those of Indians, traders, and the diverse colonial peoples, Anderson brings alive a chapter of our history that was shaped as much by individual choices and actions as by social, economic, and political forces. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Empire Express : Building the First Transcontinental Railroad
By David Haward Bain Viking Press ISBN: 067080889X Description: It was the dawn of the Gilded Age; it welded the new western United States to the East with twin bands of iron; it opened a path for settlement and exploitation, utterly transforming the West as it sealed the doom of the Plains Indian culture; it was the culmination of the backbreaking work of more than twenty-five thousand laborers; it was, without a doubt, the century’s second most transformative chain of events after the Civil War. Empire Express is the story of that gigantic enterprise to build a railroad from the Missouri to the Pacific, which culminated in the driving of the Golden Spike in the Utah desert in 1869 but ended in pervasive national scandals just four years later. It is also about the building of the enterprise known as the United States of America. Spanning three dramatic decades, during which America effectively doubled in size, dreamed of glories upon the world’s stage, fought three wars, and began to discover itself, Empire Express reads like a novel--colorful, lively, extremely dramatic--a page-turner, told from the points of view of participants. It draws on original sources as no previous chronicle has done--thousands of pages of handwritten letters, diaries, telegrams, and an array of biographical and historical works. Empire Express is also the first book to treat the building of the railroad in context, intrinsically connected to larger or distant events, part of a much larger, national picture viewed through a clear, discerning wide-angle lens. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Five Days in London, May 1940
by John Lukacs Yale University Press ISBN: 0300080301 Description: The days from May 24 to May 28, 1940 altered the course of the history of this century, as the members of the British War Cabinet debated whether to negotiate with Hitler or to continue the war. The decisive importance of these five days is the focus of John Lukacs’ss magisterial new book. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Ghosts of Cape Sabine : The Harrowing True Story of the Greely Expedition
by Leonard F. Guttridge Putnam Pub Group ISBN: 0399145893 Description: Twenty-five men went north. Only six returned alive. In July 1881, an expedition comprised mainly of American soldiers sailed off to establish a scientific base in the remote Arctic region of Lady Franklin Bay. What happened then is a remarkable three-year saga of human achievement and human fallibility, of heroism, hardship, bad luck and worse judgment. Compounded by deliberate political negligence back home, particularly on the part of Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the late president, and increasingly fierce dissension in its own camp, the expedition’s fate, and those of its would-be rescuers, would eventually encompass starvation, mutiny, suicide, shipwreck, execution...and cannibalism. Until now, the story has been only partly known and full of dark riddles, but more than seven years of research by acclaimed historian Leonard Guttridge have uncovered journals, letters, diaries, and other documentary material that for the first time provide intimate day-by-day details of the swirling thoughts, feelings, and events of that ill-fated voyage--from turbulent birth to bizarre and tragic finale. The result is a work of nonfiction narrative that reads like a novel--a raw, vivid, harrowing adventure, brilliantly told. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 The House of Rothschild : Money’s Prophets, 1798-1848
by Niall Ferguson Penguin USA ISBN: 0140240845 Description: In his rich and nuanced portrait of the remark--able, elusive Rothschild family, Oxford scholar and bestselling author Niall Ferguson uncovers the secrets behind the family’s phenomenal economic success. He reveals for the first time the details of the family’s vast political network, which gave it access to and influence over many of the greatest statesmen of the age. And he tells a family saga, tracing the importance of family unity and the profound role of Judaism in the lives of a dynasty that rose from the confines of the Frankfurt ghetto and later used its influence to assist oppressed Jews throughout Europe. A definitive work of impeccable scholarship with a thoroughly engaging narrative, The House of Rothschild is a biography of the rarest kind, in which mysterious and fascinating historical figures finally spring to life. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Polk’s Folly : An American Family History
by William Roe Polk Doubleday ISBN: 0385491506 Description: The grand saga of American history told through the story of one remarkable family--a chronicle of pioneers and generals, presidents and scoundrels, cowboys and killers, Southern belles and civil rights heroes. In 1680, a Scots-Irish mercenary named Robert Pollok fled war-torn Ireland with his family, in search of safe haven and a better life in the New World. When Robert (now using the name “Polk”) arrived in Maryland, the only land available was a wretched piece of swampfront the locals derisively dubbed “Polk’s Folly.” From this desperate and hardscrabble beginning, the Polk clan would flourish, and generate some of the most fascinating and colorful characters in American history. In these pages one finds drafters of an early Declaration of Independence, oft-wounded soldiers of the Revolutionary War, women taken hostage by Indians, land speculators, slaveholding aristocrats and populist crusaders, one of our greatest presidents, Civil War generals and foot soldiers from North and South, a grandfather who shot the sheriff of Laredo and became a cattle baron, the founders of the Wall Street firm Davis Polk, Patton’s lead tank commander, Martin Luther King’s lawyer, and the author’s amazing brother, a World War II Navy pilot and journalist who was the first casualty of the Cold War. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 The World in 1800
by Olivier Bernier John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0471303712 Description: In the year 1800, almost everyone lived very much as their ancestors had, going back countless generations. In the countryside, illiterate peasants--the majority of the population--still scratched out a living from the soil, while in the cities, merchants hawked their wares in open-air market stalls and nobles led lives of opulent leisure. Yet, everywhere there were unmistakable signs that all of this would soon change forever. Spread by France’s seemingly invincible citizens’ army, the seeds of republicanism had been planted throughout Europe. In the Americas, the United States had proved to the world the feasibility of a government of, by, and for the people, and Mexico was threatening to follow its lead. And while it still took up to four months for an official dispatch to travel from London to Calcutta, Europe’s leading nations, France and England, had established global empire-building strategies. In the year 1800, the world suddenly found itself enmeshed in a web of mercantilism, war, and political intrigue, out of which a new world--our world--was struggling to be born. In this compelling narrative renowned historian Olivier Bernier provides us with a riveting chronicle of that time, so vastly different from our own yet so pregnant with meaning for us as we embark upon a new century. From Europe’s bloodstained landscape to the prosperous ports and homesteads of a nascent United States, from the Spanish dominions of Central and South America to the slave trading posts of Africa’s Gold Coast and the lavish interiors of China’s Forbidden City, Bernier takes us on a dizzying journey around the world, providing a finely textured portrait of civilization at the dawn of the modern era. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile
By Noah T. Lukeman Fireside ISBN: 068485743X Description: IF YOU’RE TIRED OF REJECTION, THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU. Whether you are a novice writer or a veteran who has already had your work published, rejection is often a frustrating reality. Literary agents and editors receive and reject hundreds of manuscripts each month. While it’s the job of these publishing professionals to be discriminating, it’s the job of the writer to produce a manuscript that immediately stands out among the vast competition. And those outstanding qualities, says New York literary agent Noah Lukeman, have to be apparent from the first five pages. The First Five Pages reveals the necessary elements of good writing, whether it be fiction, nonfiction, journalism, or poetry, and points out errors to be avoided, such as * A weak opening hook
With exercises at the end of each chapter, this invaluable reference will allow novelists, journalists, poets and screenwriters alike to improve their technique as they learn to eliminate even the most subtle mistakes that are cause for rejection. The First Five Pages will help writers at every stage take their art to a higher--and more successful--level. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 The Elements of Style
By William Strunk, Jr., E. B. White Allyn & Bacon ISBN: 020530902X Description: According to the St. Louis Dispatch, this “excellent book, which should go off to college with every freshman, is recognized as the best book of its kind we have.” It should be the “...daily companion of anyone who writes for a living and, for that matter, anyone who writes at all” (Greensboro Daily News). “No book in shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer more than this persistent little volume” (The Boston Globe). Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
 Word Court : Wherein Verbal Virtue Is Rewarded, Crimes Against the Language Are Punished, and Poetic Justice Is Done
By Barbara Wallraff Harcourt Brace ISBN: 0151003815 Description: In 1993, The Atlantic Monthly’s senior editor Barbara Wallraff began answering grammar questions on America Online. Instantaneously the site became one of AOL’s most popular forums, as questions, and responses to Wallraff’s responses, came flooding in. This vibrant exchange became the bimonthly “Word Court” in the Atlantic Monthly, and the “Miss Manners of Grammar” was born. In Word Court, Wallraff moves beyond her column to tackle common and uncommon items, establishing rules for such issues as turns of phrase, slang, name usage, punctuation, and newly coined vocabulary. With true wit, she deliberates and decides on the right path for lovers of language, ranging from classic questions--is “a historical” or “an historical” correct?--to awkward issues--How long does someone have to be dead before we should all stop calling her “the late”? Should you use “like” or “as”--and when? The result is a warmly humorous, reassuring, and brilliantly perceptive tour of how and why we speak the way we do. Click here or on the book’s cover to purchase this title now from Amazon.com! |
