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  Mission to Madagascar - The...

  David Mould

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  Radama— the young, savvy ruler of the rising military power in Madagascar. Robert Townsend Farquhar— governor of the British island colony of Mauritius, whose plantation economy depends on slave labor. James Hastie— an enterprising East India Company sergeant, ready to take on a risky mission. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, as Britain and France face off in the southwest Indian Ocean, the destinies of these three characters intertwine. Will the British cut a deal to end the export of slaves from Madagascar, and if so at what cost? Will Radama, with Hastie by his side, win the internal power struggle against nobles and clan chieftains? Hastie' s previously unpublished journals offer the most comprehensive early 19th century account of Madagascar, its landscape, crops, industry, commerce, culture, and inhabitants, and weave a narrative of hazardous travel, byzantine court intrigue and colonial geopolitics. Sir Mervyn Brown, a former UK ambassador and historian of Madagascar, has described Hastie as " one of the most important and attractive figures in the history of Anglo-Malagasy relations."

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  Mamerto Gueritz - A Country...

  David Gunn-Johnson

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  This is the story of Mamerto Gueritz, a country priest in the second half of the nineteenth century. His is a fascinating tale, with the adventures of his father and grandfather in Spain and the subsequent deeds of his children, framing the story of the man himself.
  
   
  However, Mamerto Gueritz also offers an illustration of the ways in which the Catholic Revival in the Church of England, the Oxford Movement, spread and took root in the remotest corners of the kingdom. His story tells a much wider tale of the renewal of the Church, the revival of a glorious liturgical heritage and the search for holiness which, for Gueritz and many of his peers, was the driving force behind it all.
  
   
  Mamerto’s father had been an officer in the Royal Guard of Spain but his opposition to the absolutism of Ferdinand VII meant that he and his family had to flee. The period between the time of Gueritz’ arrival as an infant refugee from Spain in 1823 and his death in 1912 may indeed be seen as the time of the emergence and flowering of what became known as the Oxford Movement. However, it was also a time of great conflict and change both in the Church and in society. Such change was not without cost and Mamerto Gueritz shared in it all, both in the battles in London and in his country parish, which proved anything but a safe haven.
  
   
  The reader with a straightforward love of history will find Mamerto’s story a significant addition to their store of knowledge. Those who read widely in Church history, particularly that of the nineteenth century, may find that what seems like familiar ground can be anything but!  The student of the Oxford Movement and the catholic heritage of the Church of England may yet find some further insight from hitherto unreported events and in Mamerto Gueritz find also an encouragement for the work of today.

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  Stand Watie: The Life and Legacy...

  Editors Charles River

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  Stand Watie’s life connects the traditional Cherokee homeland in Tennessee and Georgia, the fight within the tribe over leaving for the West or staying on their homeland and trying to resist, and the Trail of Tears. At the same time, his life also includes the ongoing split between mixed-blood and full-blood Cherokee in the Cherokee Nation, and the chaos of Indian Territory during the Civil War.  
  	On the surface, Indian Territory was peaceful and fairly prosperous, but old resentments simmered under the surface. The most dangerous of these was in the Cherokee Nation. Following the Cherokee removal, the leaders of the faction of the tribe that had actually signed the Treaty of New Echota suffered violence. There had been a law that giving away Cherokee land was punishable by death, and several of the leaders who signed the treaty were murdered. Stand Watie was one of the signers, and he barely escaped, but one of his brothers was executed. 
  	The Principal Chief was John Ross. He and his faction managed to retain political control of the Cherokee tribe, but there was lasting enmity between the Watie and Ross factions of the tribe. In a broad sense, the signers of the hated treaty were mixed-blood Cherokee, and the resistance had been led by full-bloods. Stand Watie headed the mixed-blood faction and John Ross the full-blood faction. Ironically, John Ross himself was mixed-blood and Watie was a full-blood, but regardless, this tribal split had important ramifications for the Cherokee in the coming war. 
  	Like the country as a whole, the Cherokee Nation was split over the question of slavery, and with an estimated 100 slaves owned, Watie was the biggest native slaveholder in the region. At the start of the war, Watie was commissioned as a colonel in Confederate service and later as a brigadier general. His 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles Regiment fought more engagements than any other Confederate unit west of the Mississippi River.

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  Nearly Departed - A Memoir:...

  Gila Pfeffer

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  By the time she was thirty, Gila Pfeffer was the oldest living member of her family, having lost her mother to breast cancer and her father to colon cancer. A simple blood test confirmed she carried the BRCA1 gene—which put her at high risk of developing cancer herself. Determined to break the cycle of early death in her family, Gila decides to undergo an elective double mastectomy. 
   
   
   
  This memoir follows her journey as she becomes a reluctant expert on how to sit shiva, grows up, falls in love, and enters motherhood, before her life is derailed yet again. Her double mastectomy reveals cancer already growing in one breast. 
   
   
   
  After enduring eight rounds of chemo and the removal of her ovaries, she takes her last-ever dip in the mikvah waters as a bald, menopausal, thirty-five-year-old mother of four. With chutzpah honed over years of repeatedly surviving the worst, she manages to save her own life. 
   
   
   
  Drenched in Gila's dark humor, Nearly Departed is a story about thriving against the odds, committing to what's important, and leaving a better legacy than the one you inherited.

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  The Radical Potter - The Life...

  Tristram Hunt

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  From one of Britain's leading historians and the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, a scintillating biography of Josiah Wedgwood, the celebrated eighteenth-century potter, entrepreneur, and abolitionist 
   
   
   
  Wedgwood's pottery, such as his celebrated light-blue jasperware, is famous worldwide. Jane Austen bought it and wrote of it in her novels; Empress Catherine II of Russia ordered hundreds of pieces for her palace. But the life of Josiah Wedgwood is far richer than just his accomplishments in ceramics. He was a leader of the Industrial Revolution, a pioneering businessman, a cultural tastemaker, and a tireless scientific experimenter whose inventions made him a fellow of the Royal Society. He was also an ardent abolitionist, whose Emancipation Badge medallion—depicting an enslaved African and inscribed "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?"—became the most popular symbol of the antislavery movement on both sides of the Atlantic. And he did it all in the face of chronic disability and relentless pain: a childhood bout with smallpox eventually led to the amputation of his right leg. 
   
   
   
  Drawing on a rich array of letters, journals, and historical documents, The Radical Potter brings us the story of a singular man, his dazzling contributions to design and innovation, and his remarkable global impact.

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  The Father You Get - And the...

  Patton Dodd

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  What is it about fathers and father figures that looms so large in the lives of so many? So wonders Patton Dodd in this intimate reflection and memoir in which he wrestles with a dad-sized hole, the gap between the father he yearned to have and the father he got—an absent-while-present alcoholic whose unreliability caused chaos for everyone around him. 
   
   
   
  This struggle with the father he was given led to a variety of substituted: fathers he created, from an imaginary "Papa Friend" to male mentors he turned into father figures. Then there's the father he believed in, a Heavenly Father, made present by the steadfast and stubborn faith of his earthly mother. And finally, there is the father Dodd became when he had his own children, an experience that led him to track down the source and mystery of the father he got. 
   
   
   
  Throughout, Dodd's story resonates for anyone who struggles with the fathers they got, the fathers they wish they had—and anyone struggling to become the parent they hope to be. A lyrical, emotional meditation on the failures and glories of dadhood, The Father You Get is an extended wrestling match with the mysteries of a distant parental figure and an attempt to bridge the gap between the fathers we get and the fathers our hearts yearn for.

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