Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades

Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades
Author: Bernard Bailyn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 132400584X
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The brilliance of a master historian shines through this “elegant and engaging memoir” of a lifetime’s work (Richard Aldous, Wall Street Journal). Over a remarkable career Bernard Bailyn has reshaped our understanding of the early American past. Inscribing his superb scholarship with passion and imagination honed by a commitment to rigor, Bailyn captures the particularity of the past and its broad significance in precise, elegant prose. His transformative work has ranged from a new reckoning with the ideology that powered the opposition to British authority in the American Revolution, to a sweeping account of the peopling of America, and the critical nurturing of a new field, the history of the Atlantic world. Illuminating History is the most personal of Bailyn’s works. It is in part an intellectual memoir of the significant turns in an immensely productive and influential scholarly career. It is also alive with people whose actions touched the long arc of history. Among the dramatic human stories that command our attention: a struggling Boston merchant tormented by the tensions between capitalist avarice and a constrictive Puritan piety; an ordinary shopkeeper who in a unique way feverishly condemned British authority as corrupt and unworthy of public confidence; a charismatic German Pietist who founded a cloister in the Pennsylvania wilderness famous for its strange theosophy, its spartan lifestyle, and its rich musical and artistic achievement. And the good townspeople of Petersham, whose response in 1780 to a draft Massachusetts constitution speaks directly to us through a moving insistence on individual freedoms in the face of an imposing central authority. Here is vivid history and an illuminating self-portrait from one of the most eminent historians of our time.

The Darker Angels of Our Nature

The Darker Angels of Our Nature
Author: Philip Dwyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2021-08-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350140619
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In The Better Angels of Our Nature Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argued that modern history has witnessed a dramatic decline in human violence of every kind, and that in the present we are experiencing the most peaceful time in human history. But what do top historians think about Pinker's reading of the past? Does his argument stand up to historical analysis? In The Darker Angels of our Nature, seventeen scholars of international stature evaluate Pinker's arguments and find them lacking. Studying the history of violence from Japan and Russia to Native America, Medieval England and the Imperial Middle East, these scholars debunk the myth of non-violent modernity. Asserting that the real story of human violence is richer, more interesting and incomparably more complex than Pinker's sweeping, simplified narrative, this book tests, and bests, 'fake history' with expert knowledge.

Buzz Books 2020: Spring/Summer

Buzz Books 2020: Spring/Summer
Author:
Publisher: Publishers Lunch
Total Pages: 800
Release: 2020-01-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1948586312
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As booksellers gather for the annual Winter Institute convention, where they get to meet the season’s big authors and hope to cart home pre-publication review copies, Buzz Books 2020 presents passionate readers with some of the same insider’s look at 44 books on the way. As booksellers gather for the annual Winter Institute convention, where they get to meet the season’s big authors and hope to cart home pre-publication review copies, Buzz Books 2020 presents passionate readers with some of the same insider’s look at 44 books on the way. [Note our previously standalone young adult edition is now folded in to this edition, along with adult fiction and nonfiction.] Our “digital convention” features such major authors as bestsellers Brit Bennett, Sue Monk Kidd, and David Nicholls, along with Veronica Roth, of Divergent fame, with her first adult novel. Other sure-to-be popular titles are by Amy Engel, Debra Jo Immergut, Anna Solomon, and Ellen Marie Wiseman. Buzz Books has had a particularly stellar track record with highlighting the most talented, exciting debut authors. A legal thriller by Erica Katz has already been optioned by Netflix, and novels by Naoise Dolan and Kate Reed Petty were sold at auction. Kawai Strong Washburn has literary bona fides, as does Raven Leilani, Benjamin Nugent, and Ilana Masad. Our nonfiction selections range from comedian Mike Birbiglia’s account of becoming a father to transgender activist and author Jennifer Finney Boylan’s Good Boy: My Life In Seven Dogs. Benjamin Taylor shares his friendship with Philip Roth in Here We Are. Finally, we present early looks at new work from four up-and-coming young adult authors: Laura Bates, Brandy Colbert, Kim Johnson, and Court Stevens. And be sure to look for the next Buzz Books 2020: Fall/Winter in May, just in time for Book Expo.

Author:
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 1028
Release:
Genre:
ISBN:
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The Rector of Justin

The Rector of Justin
Author: Louis Auchincloss
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2002-07-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547524234
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“[A] certifiable masterpiece” from the acclaimed chronicler of New York City’s old money elite (The New York Observer). Widely considered Louis Auchincloss’s greatest novel, The Rector of Justin is an astute dissection of the social mores of the Northeast’s privileged establishment. The story centers on Rev. Frank Prescott, the charismatic founder and rector of a prestigious Episcopal school for boys. With laser-sharp insight, Auchincloss delivers a prismatic portrait of this commanding and complicated man through the eyes of those who knew—or thought they knew—him best. Seamlessly interweaving multiple points of view—from an adoring teacher to that of a rebellious daughter—The Rector of Justin presents a social history of the eighty years of his life: the sources of his virtues and failings, his successes, his love, and his crises of faith. As Jonathan Yardley put it in the Washington Post, “Auchincloss is one of the most accomplished and distinctive writers this country has known . . . [and] Frank Prescott is one of the great characters in American fiction.” “A daring and ambitious book . . . Its poise and taste and intelligence strike one on every page, as do its unerring knowledge and literary skill.” —The New Yorker “[The Rector of Justin] should sit on the shelf of any serious reader of American fiction.” —Jay Parini, The New York Observer “A taut and elegant study of a distinguished American whose closest friends cannot decide whether they like or detest him.” —The Times Literary Supplement “Fascinating . . . We do come to feel the reality, the complicated reality, of Francis Prescott.” —Saturday Review “My favorite of Auchincloss’s novels. Both decadent and demanding, high-hat and frank . . . A subversive in lace-up oxfords and rep tie.” —Amy Bloom

Death Zones and Darling Spies

Death Zones and Darling Spies
Author: Beverly Deepe Keever
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2020-02-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1496210468
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Chosen for 2015 One Book One Nebraska In 1961, equipped with a master's degree from famed Columbia Journalism School and letters of introduction to Associated Press bureau chiefs in Asia, twenty-six-year-old Beverly Deepe set off on a trip around the world. Allotting just two weeks to South Vietnam, she was still there seven years later, having then earned the distinction of being the longest-serving American correspondent covering the Vietnam War and garnering a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In Death Zones and Darling Spies, Beverly Deepe Keever describes what it was like for a farm girl from Nebraska to find herself halfway around the world, trying to make sense of one of the nation's bloodiest and bitterest wars. She arrived in Saigon as Vietnam's war entered a new phase and American helicopter units and provincial advisers were unpacking. She tells of traveling from her Saigon apartment to jungles where Wild West-styled forts first dotted Vietnam's borders and where, seven years later, they fell like dominoes from communist-led attacks. In 1965 she braved elephant grass with American combat units armed with unparalleled technology to observe their valor--and their inability to distinguish friendly farmers from hide-and-seek guerrillas. Keever's trove of tissue-thin memos to editors, along with published and unpublished dispatches for New York and London media, provide the reader with you-are-there descriptions of Buddhist demonstrations and turning-point coups as well as phony ones. Two Vietnamese interpreters, self-described as "darling spies," helped her decode Vietnam's shadow world and subterranean war. These memoirs, at once personal and panoramic, chronicle the horrors of war and a rise and decline of American power and prestige.

Atlantic History

Atlantic History
Author: Bernard Bailyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674020405
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Atlantic history is a newly and rapidly developing field of historical study. Bringing together elements of early modern European, African, and American history--their common, comparative, and interactive aspects--Atlantic history embraces essentials of Western civilization, from the first contacts of Europe with the Western Hemisphere to the independence movements and the globalizing industrial revolution. In these probing essays, Bernard Bailyn explores the origins of the subject, its rapid development, and its impact on historical study. He first considers Atlantic history as a subject of historical inquiry--how it evolved as a product of both the pressures of post-World War II politics and the internal forces of scholarship itself. He then outlines major themes in the subject over the three centuries following the European discoveries. The vast contribution of the African people to all regions of the West, the westward migration of Europeans, pan-Atlantic commerce and its role in developing economies, racial and ethnic relations, the spread of Enlightenment ideas--all are Atlantic phenomena. In examining both the historiographical and historical dimensions of this developing subject, Bailyn illuminates the dynamics of history as a discipline.

Sometimes an Art

Sometimes an Art
Author: Bernard Bailyn
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2015-01-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101874481
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From one of the most respected historians in America, twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a new collection of essays that reflects a lifetime of erudition and accomplishments in history. The past has always been elusive: How can we understand people whose worlds were utterly different from our own without imposing our own standards and hindsight? What did things feel like in the moment, when outcomes were uncertain? How can we recover those uncertainties? What kind of imagination goes into the writing of transformative history? Are there latent trends that distinguish the kinds of history we now write? How unique was North America among the far-flung peripheries of the early British empire? As Bernard Bailyn argues in this elegant, deeply informed collection of essays, history always combines approximations based on incomplete data with empathic imagination, interweaving strands of knowledge into a narrative that also explains. This is a stirring and insightful work drawing on the wisdom and perspective of a career spanning more than five decades—a book that will appeal to anyone interested in history.

Civilization

Civilization
Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2011-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101548029
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From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower “A dazzling history of Western ideas.” —The Economist “Mr. Ferguson tells his story with characteristic verve and an eye for the felicitous phrase.” —Wall Street Journal “[W]ritten with vitality and verve . . . a tour de force.” —Boston Globe Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries. How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic—that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors. Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.

The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson

The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson
Author: Bernard Bailyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 1974
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674641617
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The paradoxical and tragic story of America's most prominent Loyalist - a man caught between king and country.