***José María de Jesús Carvajal***is both a biography of a Mexican postrevolutionary and a study of the development of a new border between Mexico and the United States during the crucial decades of the early to midnineteenth century. The work examines the challenges faced by Carvajal, a bilingual, bicultural character in confusing times, against the historical backdrop of the history of colonial Texas and northern Mexico.Chance has chosen to focus on a political-military figure w...

The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents wit...

The award-winning memoir of life in an LA street gang from the acclaimed Chicano author and former Los Angeles Poet Laureate: "Fierce, and fearless" ( The New York Times).Luis J. Rodríguez joined his first gang at age eleven. As a teenager, he witnessed the rise of some of the most notorious cliques in Southern California. He grew up knowing only a life of violence—one that revolved around drugs, gang wars, and police brutality. But unlike most of those ar...

This acclaimed biography separates history from myth to reveal the man behind the enduring Western legend.In popular culture, Wyatt Earp is the hero of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, and a beacon of rough cowboy justice in the tumultuous American West. The subject of dozens of films, he has been invoked in battles against everything from organized crime in the 1930s to al-Qaeda after 9/11. Yet as the historian Andrew C. Isenberg reveals here,...

"[A] wide-ranging and nuanced group portrait of the Founding Fathers" by a Pulitzer Prize winner ( The New Yorker).In the early 1770s, the men who invented America were living quiet, provincial lives in the rustic backwaters of the New World, devoted to family and the private pursuit of wealth and happiness. None set out to become "revolutionary." But when events in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved quickly from protest...

This journalist's portrait of life in Iran just after the Revolution is "a book of great economy and power [with] a supreme sense of the absurd" ( New Republic).Iran, 1980: the revolutionaries have taken charge. In a deserted Teheran hotel, Ryszard Kapuściński tries to make journalistic and human sense out of the mass of notes, tapes, and photographs he had accumulated during his extended stay in Iran. Just what happened and how? What did Khomeini have to o...

An intimate, politically vital memoir by the acclaimed Czech author " of enormous power and originality" explores his life under Nazi and Communist regimes ( The New York Times Book Review).In the 1930s on the outskirts of Prague, Ivan Klíma was unaware of his concealed Jewish heritage until the invading Nazis transported him and his family to the Terezín concentration camp. Miraculously, most of them survived. But they r...

The definitive short biography of Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–98), the founding father of Irish republicanism Originally published in 1981 as part of the groundbreaking Gill's Irish Lives series, Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–98), A Life remains the most concise, accessible and authoritative introduction to one of Irish history's most seminal figures. Theobald Wolfe Tone, founder of the United Irishmen, revolutionary philosopher, nationalist martyr and, above all, legend of Irish history. For ge...

“What I done and what I been accused of covers everything, you put ’em both together.” Wyatt Moore of Caddo Lake exaggerates, but perhaps not very much. During his long life at Caddo Lake, Moore was at various times a boat operator, commercial fisherman, boat builder, farmer, fishing and hunting camp operator, guide, commercial hunter, trapper, raftsman, moonshiner, oil field worker, water well driller, and mechanical jack-of-all-trades. Still, he always found time for his lifelon...

Dramatic and immersive, Redmond is a provocative reassessment of John Redmond, Home Rule campaigner and one of Ireland's most brilliant political minds.'A vivid portrayal of one of the great political campaigns in Irish history.' Stephen Collins, Political Editor, The Irish TimesRedmond brings to life seven pivotal years in Irish history, when the campaign for Home Rule seized the imagination of a nation and brought Ireland to the brink of a negotiated settlement with Britain. The architec...

New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains are a place where two cultures - Hispanic and Anglo - meet. They're also the place where three men meet: William deBuys, a young writer; Alex Harris, a young photographer; and Jacobo Romero, an old farmer. When Harris and deBuys move to New Mexico in the 1970s, Romero is the neighbor who befriends them and becomes their teacher. With the tools of simple labor - shovel and axe, irony and humor - he shows them how to survive, even flourish, in their is...

Clayton Wheat Williams—West Texas oilman, rancher, civic leader, veteran of the Great War, and avocational historian—was a risk taker, who both reflected and molded the history of his region. His life spanned a dynamic period in Texas history when automobiles replaced horse-drawn wagons, electricity replaced steam power in the oilfields, and barren and virtually worthless ranch land became valuable for the oil and gas under its surface.The setting for Williams’s story, like that of...