The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandevile, Knight: Wherein Is Set Down the Way to the Holy Land, and to Hierusalem: As Also to the Lands of the Gr

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.

Martin Booth

Golden Boy: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood

At seven years old, Martin Booth found himself with all of Hong Kong at his feet when his father was posted there in 1952. This is his memoir of that youth, a time when he had access to corners of the colony normally closed to a gweilo, a pale fellow like him. From the plink plonk man with his dancing monkey to Nagasaki Jim, and from a drunken child molester to the Queen of Kowloon (the crazed tramp who may have been a Romanov), Martin saw it all--but his memoir illustrates a deeper challenge in his warring parents. This is an intimate and powerful memory of a place and time now past.

Nancy L. Bunge

Woman in the Wilderness: Letters of Harriet Wood Wheeler, Missionary Wife, 18321892

Woman in the Wilderness is a collection of letters written between 1832 and 1892 to and by an American woman, Harriet Wood Wheeler. Harriet's letters reveal her experiences with actors and institutions that played pivotal roles in the history of American women: the nascent literate female work force at the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts; the Ipswich Female Seminary, which was one of the first schools for women teachers; women's associations, especially in churches; and the close and enduring ties that characterized women's relationships in the late nineteenth century. Harriet's letters also provide an intimate view of the relationships between American Indians and Euro-Americans in the Great Lakes region, where she settled with her Christian missionary husband.