Kelsey Waters, a wedding consultant to the stars, doesn’t believe in love or marriage. But that all changes when she catches the bouquet at her cousin’s wedding, and her life takes a magical turn worthy of some romantic fairy tale. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last. To her dismay, her prince charming is already married. To make matters worse, she has to spend the next two weeks working closely with him on his sister’s private wedding. Can Kelsey survive two weeks beside this handsome romantic? Or will she succumb to her inner desires with reckless abandon?
Band of Gold is the exciting story of singer and actress Freda Payne. While she is best known for her 1970 Number One hit "Band of Gold", and her 1971 Grammy nominated album, Contact, her story is an inspiring adventure, lived alongside the "who's who" of the show business world including Duke Ellington, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, Omar Sharif, Quincy Jones, Liza Minneli, and Sarah Vaughn. Freda's compelling memoir is a celebration of a glamorous life well-lived.
The McCallister family settles in the northern section of the Oregon Territory in the year of 1853. There they settled and, through many tribulations and sacrifices, they came to love this wild and undeveloped country. Author Patricia N. Richards delivers an auspicious fiction debut that is romantic, compelling, and graceful.
"Robert Clive's suicide (1774), Rajah Nandakumar’s hanging (1775), to Ellenborough’s grabbing of the Gwalior throne (1843), and Ram Mohan Roy's embassy on behalf of Akbar II, and his untimely death in England (1833); the Gurkha Wars (1814-16) and the First Afghan War (1838-1842) — started, unnecessarily, in the midst of the ferocious famine of 1837— One ring and one narrative, binds them all together. The stage is set in 19th-century India—a time when racial prejudice is beginning to harden with the support of the law makers. What seems to be an innocent circus performance presentation turns into a real life police arrest and the account of the struggles of an English-Indian boy starts to unfold. Accused of being a thug and of murdering an Englishman, an officer of the East India Company army, Jonathan Lord, aka Gora Mirza, is forced into signing a confession under the Thugee Act of 1836, made a fugitive from British justice, and hunted down and hanged. Gora Mirza’s tragic end is not his alone, but one bound up with several other individuals—a senior officer, two English soldiers, a teenaged Indian widow, a nawab, a rajah and many others. Marcus, a German diarist, records it all. The story—the mystery and the chase; and the spine-chilling end—is in the matrix of the historical events of the time. Does the ring find its rightful owner…? "
Book three in the best-selling Smuggler's Wife series by one of our leading historical novelists. Kitty Farrell, headstrong and passionate as ever, is heartbroken over the apparent death by drowning of her husband Rian. Alone and grieving on the goldfields of Ballarat she turns to Rian's long-time shipmate Daniel, who has loved her from afar for many years. The consequences will be disastrous and challenge every character in this brilliant third instalment in Deborah Challinor's extraordinary Smuggler's Wife series. Vividly drawn, meticulously researched and driven by a powerful page-turning narrative, Band of Gold will resonate in the hearts of readers for a long time. 'Challinor is extraordinarily talented.' - New Zealand Books
In The Shape of Inca History, Susan Niles considers the ways in which the Inca concept of history informed their narratives, rituals, and architecture. Using sixteenth-century chronicles of Inca culture, legal documents from the first generation of conquest, and field investigation of architectural remains, she strategically explores the interplay of oral and written histories with the architectural record and provides a new and exciting understanding of the lives of the royal families on the eve of conquest.Niles focuses on the life of Huayna Capac, the Inca king who ruled at the time of the first European incursions on the Andean coast. Because he died just a few years before the Spaniards overturned the Inca world, eyewitness accounts of his deeds as recorded by the invaders can be used to separate fact from propaganda. The rich documentary sources telling of his life include extraordinarily detailed legal records that inventory lands on his estate in the Yucay Valley. These sources provide a basis—unique in the Andes—for reconstructing the social and physical plan of the estate and for dating its construction exactly.Huayna Capac's country palace shows a design different from that devised by his ancestors. Niles argues that the radical stylistic and technical innovations documented in the buildings themselves can be understood by referring to the turbulent political atmosphere prevalent at the time of his accession. Illustrated with numerous photographs and reconstruction drawings, The Shape of Inca History breaks new ground by proposing that Inca royal style was dynamic and that the design of an Inca building can best be interpreted by its historical context. In this way it is possible to recreate the development of Inca architectural style over time.
Ten essays examine a variety of objects ranging from jewelry and terracotta objects to architectural and sculpture fragments, in the antiquities collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum. The contributors undertake comparative analyses with similar objects found in the holdings of other museums, and make extensive use of illustrations and drawings to documents their arguments. The articles are in English, German, and Italian.
The Cuzco Valley of Peru was both the sacred and the political center of the largest state in the prehistoric Americas—the Inca Empire. From the city of Cuzco, the Incas ruled at least eight million people in a realm that stretched from modern-day Colombia to Chile. Yet, despite its great importance in the cultural development of the Americas, the Cuzco Valley has only recently received the same kind of systematic archaeological survey long since conducted at other New World centers of civilization. Drawing on the results of the Cuzco Valley Archaeological Project that Brian Bauer directed from 1994 to 2000, this landmark book undertakes the first general overview of the prehistory of the Cuzco region from the arrival of the first hunter-gatherers (ca. 7000 B.C.) to the fall of the Inca Empire in A.D. 1532. Combining archaeological survey and excavation data with historical records, the book addresses both the specific patterns of settlement in the Cuzco Valley and the larger processes of cultural development. With its wealth of new information, this book will become the baseline for research on the Inca and the Cuzco Valley for years to come.
