Historical Books - Page 2

The Devil in the White City

Erik Larson

By: Doubleday UK Amazon Marketplace: 12 new & used starting at $5.87

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Mystery & Thrillers -> General
Subjects -> Mystery & Thrillers -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 782 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Can't tell what this book is about; The Worlds Fair or H.H. Holmes 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book is choppy at best. It moves from one subject to the next and does not read through.
I was very dissapointed with this book. If I had known I would of bought the other book on H.H. Holmes!

Remarkable Story of Tragedy in the Shadows of Triumph 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Stories of triumph and tragedy are paralleled in this remarkable book by Erik Larson. I initially picked up this book because of an interest in Chicago architect Daniel Burnham. The coverage of Burnham was fascinating and I also found myself quickly absorbed in the suspenseful drama of H.H. Holmes. The long shadows cast by the creation of the Fair provide cover for the sinister activities of a polite professional predator. This book took me on contrasting journeys of wonder and contempt for the people encountered along the way. Larson intricately builds a remarkable portrait of Chicago in the late 19th century. He skillfully includes enough historical anecdotes to open up other avenues for exploration as well. If you have an appreciation for architecture, history, or just a good true crime story, this is a book to savor.

Sea of Poppies: A Novel

Amitav Ghosh

Amazon Price: $17.16 List Price: $26.00 Usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks By: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Amazon Marketplace: 17 new & used starting at $16.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Literary

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean; its purpose, to fight China’s vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts.  In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a freespirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races, and generations.  The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, the exotic backstreets of Canton. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, that makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive—a masterpiece from one of the world’s finest novelists.

The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel

Diane Setterfield

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Washington Square Press Amazon Marketplace: 103 new & used starting at $7.11

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Women's Fiction -> Friendship
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 598 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A book for book lovers 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Setterfield's novel grabbed me from the first page.
This is a book for book lovers. The main character is a young woman who works in her Father's antiquarian book shop; she is hired to write the biography of a famous authoress who is notorious for giving a different
"life story" to anyone seeking to write her bio. This book kept me up at night until I finished it. Great sub-plots. Can't wait to read more of Setterfield's literary creations.

Editorial Review:

Sometimes, when you open the door to thepast, what you confront is your destiny.

Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchantingstories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate livesfor herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about herextraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret forso long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her ownpainful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good. Margaret ismesmerized by the author's tale of gothic strangeness -- featuring the beautifuland willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess,a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.

Serena: A Novel

Ron Rash

Amazon Price: $14.99 List Price: $24.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Ecco Amazon Marketplace: 49 new & used starting at $14.49

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 52 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire. Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena is new to the mountains -- but she soon shows herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness. Together this lord and lady of the woodlands ruthlessly kill or vanquish all who fall out of favor. Yet when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she sets out to murder the son George fathered without her. Mother and child begin a struggle for their lives, and when Serena suspects George is protecting his illegitimate family, the Pembertons' intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel as the story moves toward its shocking reckoning.

Rash's masterful balance of violence and beauty yields a riveting novel that, at its core, tells of love both honored and betrayed.

People of the Book

Geraldine Brooks

Amazon Price: $29.65 List Price: $32.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Center Point Large Print Amazon Marketplace: 19 new & used starting at $27.32

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Literary

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 149 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Not Good Enough for Readers of the Book 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book is a good story, full of everything I like: history and mystery, religion and bravery, and a good dose of female heroism. But the chapters read unevenly, with fast-paced and engaging passages followed by leaden and clichéd portrayals, especially the chapter devoted to the Jewish Partisans fighting under Tito and the absolutely ridiculously written chapter set in turn of the century Vienna (the dialog alone, both the interior words of the narrator and the words he exchanges with others, had me hooting in disbelief).

Not that any of Brooks' writing is entirely free of clichés or hackneyed phrasing and pacing. Her writing is suitable to the telling of a story but not for sketching a genuine moment in time or expressing an original vision of the past. She does not open anything up to her readers that is particularly new or beautifully acute and accurate. Nor is Brooks much good at character development: her figures tend to be just that, figures meant to represent a certain type of person or a certain place in time. Even her narrator is a flat and unbelievable structure (common to best sellers) and the narrator's mother and recently discovered father, even worse. Everything is in superlatives: uber-successful surgeon, famous and fabulous artist, most determined restorer of books with a PhD from Harvard (of course) willing to spend months and months learning how to make parchment (or grind berries or whatever), and yet the world's meanest mom (and youngest chair of the neurosurgery department) gives her not one damn iota of respect. Etc., etc. Subtlety is not one of Brooks' virtues: she likes to slam us over the head with her characters and the situations they find themselves in.

But Brooks is a fine historian and she gathers together a lot of good facts; she is a good story teller, capable of wrapping those acts in a drapery of fun and froth, or blood and gore. I would guess that the best chapters -- the ones most true and moving and fresh -- are based on her favorite, if not best, areas of research. She herself admits it is hard to tell again the story of Jewish persecution under the Nazis and she does not do a good job of it. In contrast, the initial chapter set in Sarajevo in 1996 was very real and alive, and I loved the chapter set in Seville in 1480 (although should not the setting have been Granada? That is were the Emir lived, and I believe Brooks is referring to the beautiful Alhambra which is in Granada and not in Seville, as the place where the slave girl is sent to paint the Emir's lover). Despite the gaff in location, that chapter was rendered with a lighter touch, and a richer emotional range (if we ignore the rape scene and the totally unbelievable lesbian interlude) than any of the other historical chapters. In addition, the heroine of that chapter actually seemed like a living and breathing person, not some Madame Tussaud wax figure.

Brooks' book has a good story. I wish she could have trusted all of us more to tell the story without telling us what we should think; I wish she could have given us more complex and real characters we could have identified with and cheered on; and I wish she had offered a fresh and meaningful observation into why we should not be burning books, but reading them. Her main characters profess to love books -- to be People of the Book -- but we never find out why.

For more reviews, go to www.readallday.org

Editorial Review:

The “complex and moving”(The New Yorker) novel by Pulitzer Prize–winner Geraldine Brooks follows a rare manuscript through centuries of exile and war

Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called “a tour de force”by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century S pain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock its deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics.

Outlander

Diana Gabaldon

By: Doubleday Canada, Limited Amazon Marketplace: 10 new & used starting at $5.61

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1371 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great fun literary couple 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I have read and reread this book several times and I love it everytime. Great major characters and interesting minor characters make this story fun and you get drawn into the time frame of the story. If you read the first couple of chapters and you are bored just keep reading get into it.

Outstanding 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

So much has already been said about this series of books, but I can't help it, I have to add my two cents just in case there are still people out there who have put off reading this series because of the time-travel aspect, (which is why I didn't read them for so long as a big fan of historical fiction). Stop resisting, start at the beginning, go out and pick up a copy of Outlander and I promise you will not stop until you have read all of the books in the series!

Ms. Gabaldon writes such strong, individualistic characters and her plots are well thought out and drawn together very nicely. There are so many stand-out scenes in this book, so many intense experiences for both the characters and the reader. Claire and Jamie Fraser are by far the best characters I've ever encountered - so complex and yet so simple at their core. Ms. Gabaldon is truly talented and I hope this series never ends! I only wish I had read it years ago!

The Unforgiven (Leisure Western)

Alan Lemay

Amazon Price: $6.99 List Price: $6.99 Not yet published By: Leisure Books

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Westerns -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Westerns -> General AAS

The Whiskey Rebels: A Novel

David Liss

Amazon Price: $17.16 List Price: $26.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Random House Amazon Marketplace: 57 new & used starting at $10.25

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 81 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

David Liss’s bestselling historical thrillers, including A Conspiracy of Paper and The Coffee Trader, have been called remarkable and rousing: the perfect combination of scrupulous research and breathless excitement. Now Liss delivers his best novel yet in an entirely new setting–America in the years after the Revolution, an unstable nation where desperate schemers vie for wealth, power, and a chance to shape a country’s destiny.

Ethan Saunders, once among General Washington’s most valued spies, now lives in disgrace, haunting the taverns of Philadelphia. An accusation of treason has long since cost him his reputation and his beloved fiancée, Cynthia Pearson, but at his most desperate moment he is recruited for an unlikely task–finding Cynthia’s missing husband. To help her, Saunders must serve his old enemy, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who is engaged in a bitter power struggle with political rival Thomas Jefferson over the fragile young nation’s first real financial institution: the Bank of the United States.

Meanwhile, Joan Maycott is a young woman married to another Revolutionary War veteran. With the new states unable to support their ex-soldiers, the Maycotts make a desperate gamble: trade the chance of future payment for the hope of a better life on the western Pennsylvania frontier. There, amid hardship and deprivation, they find unlikely friendship and a chance for prosperity with a new method of distilling whiskey. But on an isolated frontier, whiskey is more than a drink; it is currency and power, and the Maycotts’ success attracts the brutal attention of men in Hamilton’s orbit, men who threaten to destroy all Joan holds dear.

As their causes intertwine, Joan and Saunders–both patriots in their own way–find themselves on opposing sides of a daring scheme that will forever change their lives and their new country. The Whiskey Rebels is a superb rendering of a perilous age and a nation nearly torn apart–and David Liss’s most powerful novel yet.

The Other Queen: A Novel

Philippa Gregory

Amazon Price: $15.57 List Price: $25.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Touchstone Amazon Marketplace: 90 new & used starting at $7.45

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> British -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 67 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Two women competing for a man's heart
Two queens fighting to the death for dominance
The untold story of Mary, Queen of Scots

This dazzling novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Philippa Gregory presents a new and unique view of one of history's most intriguing, romantic, and maddening heroines. Biographers often neglect the captive years of Mary, Queen of Scots, who trusted Queen Elizabeth's promise of sanctuary when she fled from rebels in Scotland and then found herself imprisoned as the "guest" of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and his indomitable wife, Bess of Hardwick.

The newly married couple welcome the doomed queen into their home, certain that serving as her hosts and jailers will bring them an advantage in the cutthroat world of the Elizabethan court. To their horror, they find that the task will bankrupt them, and as their home becomes the epicenter of intrigue and rebellion against Elizabeth, their loyalty to each other and to their sovereign comes into question. If Mary succeeds in seducing the earl into her own web of treachery and treason, or if the great spymaster William Cecil links them to the growing conspiracy to free Mary from her illegal imprisonment, they will all face the headsman.

Philippa Gregory uses new research and her passion for historical accuracy to place a well-known heroine in a completely new tale full of suspense, passion, and political intrigue. For years, readers have clamored for Gregory to tell Mary's story, and The Other Queen is the result of her determination to present a novel worthy of this extraordinary heroine.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel

Lisa See

Amazon Price: $11.20 List Price: $14.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Random House Trade Paperbacks Amazon Marketplace: 331 new & used starting at $1.50

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Historical
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Women's Fiction -> Friendship
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> World Literature -> United States -> Asian American -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 615 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Snow Flower 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The product was well packaged and just as described. It took a little longer than the other products I ordered but it finally got here.

Editorial Review:

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.