The Scorpion's Strike: Empire X

Tom Gjelten

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause

In this widely hailed book, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten fuses the story of the Bacardi family and their famous rum business with Cuba's tumultuous experience over the last 150 years to produce a deeply entertaining historical narrative. The company Facundo Bacardi launched in Cuba in 1862 brought worldwide fame to the island, and in the decades that followed his Bacardi descendants participated in every aspect of Cuban life. With his intimate account of their struggles and adventures across five generations, Gjelten brings to life the larger story of Cuba's fight for freedom, its tortured relationship with America, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the violent division of the Cuban nation.

The Pastons Pastons: A Family in the Wars of the Roses a Family in the Wars of the Roses

Attractive selection conveys well their recurrent concerns with land, money, civil violence, flirtation, marriage, and the purchase of ginger and lace. MEDIUM AEVUM Vivid first-hand accounts of life in England at the time ofthe Wars of the Roses, presented in their historical context. Essential reading on the English middle ages. Within three generations (1426 to 1485), and through the dark anddangerous years of the Wars of the Roses, the Pastons establishedthemselves as a family of consequence, both in their native Norfolk andwithin court circles. Ambitious and highly mobile - womenfolk as wellas men - they kept in touch by correspondence, usually but notinvariably through the medium of a clerk. These letters, a raresurvival, break upon us across the centuries with the urgency, andsometimes the violence, of their preoccupations: defending property, fighting court cases, making the right alliances, and, on the domesticside, managing their estates, conducting their courtships, stockingtheir cupboards. Selected and presented here with Richard Barber'sinvaluable linking narrative, they bring the middle ages triumphantlyto life.

Robert Rogers

Journals of Robert Rogers of the Rangers

'The thrilling true account of a famous woodsman, scout & guerilla leader during the formative years of the American Nation' In the evocative pages of Rogers own journal we are taken through a landscape of dark untrodden forest where danger from hostile Indians and the French Army threaten every step. Famous exploits of guerilla warfare are graphically told, including battles and ambushes on America's lakes, the devastating 'Fight on Snowshoes' and the raid against the Abanakee's village at St, Francis, recounted across time by Rogers himself.