19th Century Books

Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson

David S Reynolds

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

Decent Overview 3 out of 5 stars.
23 of 25 people found this review helpful.

David Reynolds, whose "Beneath the American Renaissance" gave us a cultural tour of antebellum America, now gives us a wider look at the Jacksonian era. While his book provides a decent overview for the casual reader, it lacks much of a new argument for the dedicated student of the period.

The introduction offers the potentially interesting, although hardly groundbreaking thesis, that the Jacksonian era was one of the most culturally rich in American history, and that much of this richness can be found along the margins, among the promoters of fads, the crank preachers, the utopians, and the radical reformers. In the book, however, Reynolds shies away from exploring this line of thinking too fully. Instead we get a largely traditional history of the period, even in its assessment of Jacksonian Democracy as a largely unproblematic democratic movement. His chapters on politics contain little or no new information or interpretation.

Reynolds is not, by training, a historian, but rather a literary scholar. So it should come as no surprise that the strongest chapter in the book, not to mention the longest, is the one which deals with the literary and artistic accomplishments of the period. Glossing over some of his more complex arguments from "Beneath the American Renaissance" Reynolds gives us a good, concise, and informative, view of the works of the major literary figures of this period, and how they fit into the politics of the day. Overall, this is a good book for someone who knows little about the period, but a well informed reader would do better with works such as Sean Wilentz "Rise of American Democracy" or David Walker Howe's "What Hath God Wrought!"

Editorial Review:

A fascinating and definitive history of Jacksonian America by Bancroft Prize-winning author David S. Reynolds.

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

Nathaniel Philbrick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 284 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex--an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page-turner, Nathaniel Philbrick restores this epic story to its rightful place in American history.

In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, the survivors clung to life as one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear.

In the Heart of the Sea tells perhaps the greatest sea story ever. Philbrick interweaves his account of this extraordinary ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore and with a brilliantly detailed portrait of the lost, unique community of Nantucket whalers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ship's cabin boy. At once a literary companion and a page-turner that speaks to the same issues of class, race, and man's relationship to nature that permeate the works of Melville, In the Heart of the Sea will endure as a vital work of American history.

"Nathaniel Philbrick has taken one of the most horrifying stories of maritime history and turned it into a classic. This is historical writing at its best--and at the same time, one of the most chilling books I have ever read." --Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

Steven Johnson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 103 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Good book, but Kindle edition falls short 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This was the first book I purchased for my Kindle, based on a friend's recommendation (who had read the print version). I found it a very enjoyable read, and it will be especially appealing to those interested in epidemiology, statistical graphics, and medical history.

However, if you care at all about annotations and such, I recommend you get it in print, not as a Kindle e-book. The book has very extensive notes at the end. I have to believe that these notes are numbered, and that there are superscripts in the main text of the printed version that reference these notes. However, in the Kindle edition, there are no links to these notes (even though such linking is possible), and there is no way to associate a given end note with a location in the text. I doubt that I would have interrupted my reading to follow many such notes, but I certainly would have done so a FEW times on topics of particular interest to me, and the inability to do so is a big loss.

The Kindle edition also includes the complete index, minus page numbers, and again with no links. This is not as big a problem, as one can use the search feature to find those locations.

What I wonder now is if this lack of linkage to end notes is the norm for Kindle books, or whether The Ghost Map is unusual in that respect. I suppose I will be pretty leery of reading nonfiction in this format in the future. This e-book cost me less than the printed form -- but I also received significantly less.

Another general note on the book is that it is disappointing that it does not display the second version of Snow's map (with voronoi boundaries) that is discussed in the conclusions. It would seem that this would be the "title map" so it is a curious omission.

Editorial Review:

This thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London is a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world. Unabridged. 8 CDs.

The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York

Matthew Goodman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful, entertaining, and surprisingly true story of how in the summer of 1835 a series of articles in the Sun, the first of the city’s “penny papers,” convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited.

Six articles, purporting to reveal the lunar discoveries made by a world-famous British astronomer, described the life found on the moon—including unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and, strangest of all, four-foot-tall flying man-bats. The series quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era. And the Sun, a brash working-class upstart less than two years old, had become the most widely read newspaper in the world.

Told in richly novelistic detail, The Sun and the Moon brings the raucous world of 1830s New York City vividly to life—the noise, the excitement, the sense that almost anything was possible. The book overflows with larger-than-life characters, including Richard Adams Locke, author of the moon series (who never intended it to be a hoax at all); a fledgling showman named P.T. Barnum, who had just brought his own hoax to New York; and the young writer Edgar Allan Poe, who was convinced that the moon series was a plagiarism of his own work.

An exhilarating narrative history of a city on the cusp of greatness and a nation newly united by affordable newspapers, The Sun and the Moon may just be the strangest true story you’ve ever read.

The Wars of the Roses

Alison Weir

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Weir does a masterful job of leading the layman through the entwined family trees of England's powerful families and the many usurpers to the throne. . . . [She] has perfected the art of bringing history to life."
--Chicago Tribune
Lancaster and York. For much of the fifteenth century, these two families were locked in battle for control of the British throne. Kings were murdered and deposed. Armies marched on London. Old noble names were ruined while rising dynasties seized power and lands. The war between the royal Houses of Lancaster and York, the longest and most complex in British history, profoundly altered the course of the monarchy.
Alison Weir, one of the foremost authorities on the British royal family, brings brilliantly to life both the war itself and the historic figures who fought it on the great stage of England. The Wars of the Roses is history at its very best--swift and compelling, rich in character, pageantry, and drama, and vivid in its re-creation of an astonishing, dangerous, and often grim period of history.
"[A] spellbinding chronicle. . . Weir's dark, glorious pageant restores the personal dimension to an oft-told tale without losing sight of a war that shattered feudalism, paved the way for capitalism and weakened the monarchy."
--Publishers Weekly
"[Weir is] skilled at delineating the many memorable characters of the age. . . . It's a tribute to her skill that she leaves you wanting more."
--The Cleveland Plain Dealer
AN ALTERNATE SELECTION OF THE BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB

The Chicago World's Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record (Dover Architectural Series)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great look at the "White City" 4 out of 5 stars.
11 of 16 people found this review helpful.

A beautiful collection of images, showing the wonders of the 1893 fair. A great look back.

A trip back in time 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Beautiful photos and thoughtful text. This book does a nice job of condensing the story and mood of the fair into a quick and easy to read format. I own several books about the fair and while some have more photos, this is still my favorite. A must have for those interested in the Columbian Exposition, Chicago history and architecture. The vastness of the White City is something I can scarcely imagine. I especially appreciated that the author details the fates of many of the fair's artistic treasures as well as discussing the changed landscape of the geographical site of the fair.

Lovely pictures and a map of the fair 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I became interested in the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893 through a friend and I bought this book for him and a copy for myself and was amazed by the beautiful and amazing buildings and the fact that all of these structures stood in my city and then were destroyed. I then read the Devil in the White City and pulled this book out as a reference and found the map of the exposition in the front of the book to be a cool way to look up some of the displays or events mentioned in the book (devil in the white city). As I understand it, Burnham only allowed the exposition to be photographed per his approval, therefore, there are only a limited number of pictures that any book could publish on the topic. I think that this book offers big, beautiful pictures and interesting facts about the displays.

Editorial Review:

Colossal spectacle preserved in 128 rare, vintage photographs with concise, fact-filled text: 200 buildings — 79 of foreign governments, 38 of U.S. states — the original ferris wheel, first midway, Edison's kinetoscope, much more. 128 black-and-white photographs. Captions. Map. Index.

The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805

Richard Zacks

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Total reviews: 60 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A real-life thriller, now in paperback -- the true story of the unheralded American who brought the Barbary Pirates to their knees

In an attempt to stop the legendary Barbary Pirates of North Africa from hijacking American ships, William Eaton set out on a secret mission to overthrow the government of Tripoli. The operation was sanctioned by President Thomas Jefferson, who at the last moment grew wary of "intermeddling" in a foreign government and sent Eaton off without proper national support. Short on supplies, given very little money and only a few men, Eaton and his mission seemed doomed from the start. He triumphed against all odds, recruited a band of European mercenaries in Alexandria, and led them on a march across the Libyan Desert. Once in Tripoli, the ragtag army defeated the local troops and successfully captured Derne, laying the groundwork for the demise of the Barbary Pirates. Now, Richard Zacks brings this important story of America’s first overseas covert op to life.

Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention

Gary J. Bass

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Why do we sometimes let evil happen to others and sometimes rally to stop it? Whose lives matter to us? These are the key questions posed in this important and perceptive study of the largely forgotten nineteenth-century “atrocitarians”—some of the world’s first human rights activists. Wildly romantic, eccentrically educated, and full of bizarre enthusiasms, they were also morally serious people on the vanguard of a new political consciousness. And their legacy has much to teach us about the human rights crises of today.

Gary Bass shatters the myth that the history of humanitarian intervention began with Bill Clinton, or even Woodrow Wilson, and shows, instead, that there is a tangled international tradition, reaching back more than two hundred years, of confronting the suffering of innocent foreigners. Bass describes the political and cultural landscapes out of which these activists arose, as an emergent free press exposed Europeans and Americans to atrocities taking place beyond their shores and galvanized them to act. He brings alive a century of passionate advocacy in Britain, France, Russia, and the United States: the fight the British waged against the oppression of the Greeks in the 1820s, the huge uproar against a notorious massacre in Bulgaria in the 1870s, and the American campaign to stop the Armenian genocide in 1915. He tells the gripping stories of the activists themselves: Byron, Bentham, Madison, Gladstone, Dostoevsky, and Theodore Roosevelt among them.

Military missions in the name of human rights have always been dangerous undertakings. There has invariably been the risk of radical destabilization and the threatening blurring of imperial and humanitarian intentions. Yet Bass demonstrates that even in the imperialistic heyday of the nineteenth century, humanitarian ideals could play a significant role in shaping world politics. He argues that the failure of today’s leading democracies to shoulder such responsibilities has led to catastrophes such as those in Rwanda and Darfur—catastrophes that he maintains are neither inevitable nor traditional.

Timely and illuminating, Freedom’s Battle challenges our assumptions about the history of morally motivated foreign policy and sets out a path for reclaiming that inheritance with greater modesty and wisdom.

The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century

Jonathan Miles

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Wreck of the Medusa is Jonathan Miles's spellbinding account of the most famous shipwreck before the Titanic. Drawing on contemporaneously published accounts and journals of survivors, Miles brilliantly reconstructs the ill-fated voyage and the events that inspired Theodore Gericault's magnificent painting The Raft of the Medusa.

In July of 1816, the French frigate Medusa, bound for the Senegalese port colony of Saint Louis under the command of an incompetent royalist captain, hit a famously treacherous reef. In the chaos that ensued, the commander and a privileged few claimed the lifeboats. The rest were herded onto a makeshift raft and set adrift. Without a compass or many provisions, hit by a vicious storm the first night and exposed to sweltering heat during the following days, the group set upon each other: mayhem, mutiny, and murder ensued. When rescue arrived thirteen days later, only fifteen were alive.

Two survivors' written account of the tragedy became an international best seller that exposed far-reaching corruption in Restoration France. The scandal inspired a young artist, Theodore Gericault, whose iconic depiction of suffering and hope won first prize at the Salon of 1819 and captivated viewers in the Louvre for centuries to come.

Sailing Alone Around the World

Joshua Slocum, Thomas Fogarty, George Varian

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Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The classic travel narrative of a Don Quixote-of-the-seas-the first person to circumnavigate the world singlehandedly.

First published in 1900, Joshua Slocum's autobiographical account of his solo trip around the world is one of the most remarkable--and entertaining--travel narratives of all time. Setting off alone from Boston aboard the thirty-six foot wooden sloop Spray in April 1895, Captain Slocum went on to join the ranks of the world's great circumnavigators--Magellan, Drake, and Cook. But by circling the globe without crew or consorts, Slocum would outdo them all: his three-year solo voyage of more than 46,000 miles remains unmatched in maritime history for courage, skill, and determination. Sailing Alone Around the World recounts Slocum's wonderful adventures: hair-raising encounters with pirates off Gibraltar and savage Indians in Tierra del Fuego; raging tempests and treacherous coral reefs; flying fish for breakfast in the Pacific; and a hilarious visit with Henry ("Dr. Livingstone, I presume?") Stanley in South Africa. A century later, Slocum's incomparable book endures as one of the greatest narratives of adventure ever written.