Adam Whistler has it all, so why does he feel so empty? When he breaks his ankle on a Mediterranean holiday he impulsively ends his relationship, toppling himself into emotional free fall. At a house party he meets--and beds--the lovely Morgan. But when he encounters her a few days later she has no memory of him and introduces herself as Leila. Leila has dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personalities. People are being murdered and Leila fears that Morgan, the personality Adam first met, is the killer. He doesn't believe that any part of her is capable of it, so he sets out to unravel the mystery of her past. Tumult is a stylish, contemporary psychological thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, widely regarded as Germany's greatest living poet, was already well known in the 1960s, the tempestuous decade of which Tumult is an autobiographical record. Derived from old papers, notes, jottings, photos, and letters that the poet stumbled upon years later in his attic, the volume is not so much about the man, but rather the many places he visited and people whom he met on his travels through the Soviet Union and Cuba during the 1960s. The book is made up of four longform pieces written from 1963 to 1970, each episode concluding with a poem and postscript written in 2014. Tumult is based on Enzensberger's personal experience as a left-wing sympathizer during that tumultuous decade and focuses on political events and their participants. Translated by Mike Mitchell, the book is a lively and deftly written travelogue offering a glimpse into the history of leftist thought. Dedicated to "those who disappeared," Tumult is a document of that which remains one of humanity's headiest times. "Enzensberger is the most important postwar writer you have never read."--London Review of Books
In the war-fevered spring and summer of 1861, a group of slaves in Adams County, Mississippi, conspired to gain their freedom by overthrowing and murdering their white masters. The conspiracy was discovered, the plotters were arrested and tried, and at least forty slaves in and around Natchez were hanged. By November the affair was over, and the planters of the district united to conceal the event behind a veil of silence. In 1971, Winthrop D. Jordan came upon the central document, previously unanalyzed by modern scholars, upon which this extraordinary book is based - a record of the testimony of some of the accused slaves as they were interrogated by a committee of planters determined to ferret out what was going on. This discovery led him on a twenty-year search for additional information about the aborted rebellion. Because no official report or even newspaper account of the plot existed, the search for evidence became a feat of historical detection. Jordan gathered information from every possible source - the private letters and diaries of members of the families involved in suppressing the conspiracy and of people who recorded the rumors that swept the Natchez area in the unsettled months following the beginning of the war; letters from Confederate soldiers concerned about the events back home; the journal of a Union officer who heard of the plot; records of the postwar Southern Claims Commission; census documents; plantation papers; even gravestones. What has emerged from this odyssey of research is a brilliantly written re-creation of one of the last slave conspiracies in the United States. It is also a revealing portrait of the Natchez region at the very beginning of the CivilWar, when Adams County was one of the wealthiest communities in the nation and a few powerful families interconnected by marriage and business controlled not only a large black population but the poorer whites as well. In piecing together the fragments of extant information about the conspiracy, Jordan has produced a vivid picture of the plantation slave community in southwestern Mississippi in 1861 - its composition and distribution; the degree of mobility permitted slaves; the ways information was passed around slave quarters and from plantation to plantation; the possibilities for communication with town slaves, free blacks, and white abolitionists. Jordan also explores the treatment of blacks by their owners, the kinds of resentments the slaves harbored, the sacrifices they were willing to make to protect or avenge abused family members, and the various ways in which they viewed freedom. Tumult and Silence at Second Creek is a major work by one of the most distinguished scholars of slavery and race relations. Winthrop D. Jordan's study of the slave society of the Natchez area at the onset of the Civil War is a landmark contribution to the field. More than that, his exhaustive and resourceful search for documentation and his careful analysis of sources make the study an extended and innovative essay on the nature of historical evidence and inference.
Among the theses that for centuries have ensured Niccolò Machiavelli an ambiguous fame, a special place goes to his extremely positive opinion of social conflicts, and, more in particular, to the claim that in ancient Rome 'the disunion between the plebs and the Roman senate made that republic free and powerful' (Discourses on Livy I.4). Contrary to a long tradition that had always highly valued civic concord, Machiavelli thought that - at least under certain conditions - internecine discord could be a source of strength and not of weakness, and built upon this daring proposition an original vision of political order. Machiavelli in Tumult (originally published in Italian in 2011) is the first book-length study entirely devoted to analyzing this idea, its ancient roots (never before identified), its enduring (but often invisible) influence up until the American and the French Revolution (and beyond), and its relevance for contemporary political theory.
The Tottenham family is falling apart. There is no money to maintain the crumbling house and farm in County Westmeath, so decisions have to be made. Brothers Nick and Tony, with no prospect of a future in rural Ireland, make the long journey to their uncle's ranch in Australia. As World War Two looms, the entire family signs up to fight: mathematician mother Eleanor calculates flight paths; sister Rose repairs radar masts in Lincolnshire; Nick and Tony, like thousands of others, enlist in Australia; even their ageing father Gerald signs up for duty in the Far East. Little does each foresee what terror, starvation and heartache lay ahead, and what it would take to survive. In a gripping narrative that spans four generations and encompasses the battlefields of Syria and Egypt, the Australian outback, night sorties over Germany, English airfields and the horrors of a Sumatran prison camp, this is a harrowing story of hardship and heroism, based on an Irish family's experience.
In The 1624 Tumult of Mexico in Perspective Angela Ballone offers, for the first time, a comprehensive study of an understudied period of Mexican early modern history. By looking at the mandates of three viceroys who, to varying degrees, participated in the events surrounding the Tumult, the book discusses royal authority from a transatlantic perspective that encompasses both sides of the Iberian Atlantic. Considering the similarities and tensions that coexisted in the Iberian Atlantic, Ballone offers a thorough reassessment of current historiography on the Tumult proving that, despite the conflicts and arguments underlying the disturbances, there was never any intention to do away with the king’s authority in New Spain.
In 1918, the RAF was established as the world's first independent air force. To mark the 100th anniversary of its creation, Penguin are publishing the Centenary Collection, a series of six classic books highlighting the skill, heroism esprit de corps that have characterised the Royal Air Force throughout its first century. Anglo-American James Goodson's war began on Sept 3rd 1939, when the SS Athenia was torpedoed and sank off the Hebrides. Surviving the sinking and distinguishing himself rescuing survivors, Goodson immediately signed on with the RAF. He was an American, but he wanted to fight. Goodson flew Spitfires with an RAF Eagle Squadron before later joining his countrymen with the Fourth Fighter Group to get behind the controls of Thunderbolts and Mustangs where he became known as 'King of the Strafers'. Chock full of breathtaking descriptions of aerial dogfights as well as the stories of others of the heroic 'few', Tumult in the Clouds is the ultimate story of War in the air, told by the one of the Second World War's outstanding fighter pilots. The Centenary Collection: 1. The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary 2. Tumult in the Clouds by James Goodson 3. Going Solo by Roald Dahl 4. First Light by Geoffrey Wellum 5. Tornado Down by John Peters & John Nichol 6. Immediate Response by Mark Hammond
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A thwarted love triangle of heartbreak rediscovered after almost two hundred years—two men and a woman of equal ambition—that exploded in scandal and investigation, set between America's Revolution and its Civil War, revealing an age in subtle and powerful transformation, caught between the fight for women's rights and the campaign waged by evangelical Protestants to dominate the nation's culture and politics. From the winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize in History. At its center—and the center of a love triangle—Martha Parker, a gifted young New England woman, smart, pretty, ambitious, determined to make the most of her opportunities, aspiring to become an educator and a foreign missionary. Late in 1825, Martha accepted a proposal from a schoolmaster, Thomas Tenney, only to reject him several weeks later for a rival suitor, a clergyman headed for the mission field, Elnathan Gridley. Tenney's male friends, deeply resentful of the new prominence of women in academies, benevolent and reform associations, and the mission field, decided to retaliate on Tenney's behalf by sending an anonymous letter to the head of the foreign missions board impugning Martha's character. Tenney further threatened Martha with revealing even more about their relationship, thereby ruining her future prospects as a missionary. The head of the board began an inquiry into the truth of the claims about Martha, and in so doing, collected letters, diaries, depositions, and firsthand witness accounts of Martha's character. The ruin of Martha Parker's hopes provoked a resistance within evangelical ranks over womanhood, manhood, and, surprisingly, homosexuality, ultimately threatening to destroy the foreign missions enterprise.
