Tanzanite's Castle Full of Books: Weekly Wishlist

Weekly Wishlist

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Every week Tanzanite features upcoming historical fiction and history related non-fiction books that have come to her attention and may be of interest to others. Since she has an out of control TBR pile, so should everyone else!

Sir Walter Raleigh by Penry Williams and Mark Nicholls. Non-fiction. UK release February 10, 2011; US release April 7, 2011. Sir Walter Raleigh is a figure writ large in popular imagination. Yet how can we understand this man who was soldier, voyager, visionary, courtier, politician, poet, historian, patriot and "traitor"? We know some facts, and much can be learned from Raleigh’s prose and poetry about his ideas, personality, feelings and values. Important new texts of his works have recently been published: we now possess reliable versions of his poems, his letters, and his travel narratives. No biography of Raleigh, however, can be complete without an assessment of his posthumous reputation. Myths that accumulated around him tell us something about the man himself, but far more about the perceptions of his own and subsequent generations. Raleigh’s talents as a writer ensured his positive legacy, but the appropriation of his legend for so many differing political uses has left us with a complex picture. In this original and important new biography Williams and Nicholls set this right.

Death in Florence by Paul Strathern. UK release May 19, 2011. By the end of the fifteenth century, Florence was well established as the home of the Renaissance. As generous patrons to the likes of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the ruling Medici embodied the progressive humanist spirit of the age, and in Lorenzo the Magnificent they possessed a diplomat capable of guarding the militarily weak city in a climate of constantly shifting allegiances between the major Italian powers.

However, in the form of Savonarola, an unprepossessing provincial monk, Lorenzo found his nemesis. Filled with Old Testament fury and prophecies of doom, Savonarola’s sermons reverberated among a disenfranchised population, who preferred mediaeval Biblical certainties to the philosophical interrogations and intoxicating surface glitter of the Renaissance. Savonarola’s aim was to establish a ‘City of God’ for his followers, a new kind of democratic state, the likes of which the world had never seen before. The battle which this provoked would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events – invasions, trials by fire, the ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, terrible executions and mysterious deaths – featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figures.

This famous struggle has often been portrayed as a simple clash of wills between a benign ruler and religious fanatic, between secular pluralism and repressive extremism. However, in an exhilaratingly rich and deeply researched story, Paul Strathern reveals the paradoxes, self-doubts and political compromises which made the battle for the soul of the Renaissance city one of the most complex and important moments in Western history.

The Crusade of Darkness by Giulio Leoni (translated from Italian). UK release June 2, 2011. A medieval murder mystery - can Italian poet turned sleuth Dante Alighieri uncover who is behind the ritual murders of young women in Rome?

Italy

, October 1301. Dante Alighieri, Prior to the city of Florence, is sent to Rome to meet with the Pope. Sinister omens greet his arrival; the river Tiber is threatening to burst its banks and the corpses of several young woman have been found eviscerated and ritually murdered. Dante has no power to order an investigation but when the authorities show little interest in the deaths he promises the mother of one victim that he will bring the murderer to justice. But when Dante visits the

Vatican

, and makes the acquaintance of an ambitious senator named Spada, he discovers that the city hides yet more dark secrets…

The French Companion by Katharine McMahon. UK release June 2, 2011.

A thrilling love story set during the French Revolution, from the author of the bestseller, The Rose of Sebastopol. Madame begins in 1788, in the heady days just before the French revolution, when Paris is fizzing with new ideas about liberty and equality. Asa Ardleigh, the impressionable 19-year-old daughter of a country squire, has traveled to the city with her older sister, Philippa, and Philippa's new husband. In Paris, they are introduced to the literary salon of Madame de Genlis. It is in this salon that Asa meets, and falls in love with, a dashing intellectual and idealist, Didier Paulin. Their affair is curtailed when Asa is forced to return to

England

, but they continue to write as the storm clouds gather over

France

and war with

England

seems imminent. Meanwhile back at home, no one knows of Asa's liaison. Asa's middle sister, Georgina, has met Harry Shackleford, the most eligible man in London that season, and to whom the Ardleigh estate is entailed. After the death of their mother, the Ardleigh girls' father began to drink heavily and now the estate is nearly bankrupt. In Shackleford, Georgina sees not only a fortuitous marriage for her sister, but also the solution to their financial woes. However Asa's accomplishments need some polishing. Georgina therefore employs Madame de Rusigneux, a French Marquise. Asa soon discovers there is more to this woman than meets the eye...

Cleopatra Confesses by Carolyn Meyer. Young Adult. US and UK release June 7, 2011. Some day I shall become a great ruler of

Egypt

, better than my sisters can dream of being, but Imust take care not to let them know this. They are jealous, but they do not fear me—not yet.

In the first century B.C., Cleopatra, the third of the pharaoh’s six children, learns that her father has chosen her to be the next queen of

Egypt

. But when King Ptolemy is forced into exile, Cleopatra is left to fend for herself in a palace rife with intrigue and murder. Smart, courageous, ambitious, and sensuously beautiful, she possesses the charm to cause two of history’s most famous leaders to fall in love with her. But as her cruel sisters plot to steal the throne, Cleopatra realizes there is only one person on whom she can rely—herself.

For Honour and Fame: Chivalry in

England

1066-1500 by Nigel Saul. Non-fiction. UK release June 9, 2011.

The world of medieval chivalry is at once glamorous and violent, alluring yet alien. Our popular views of the period are largely inherited from the nineteenth-century romantics, for whom chivalry evoked images of knights in shining armour, competing for the attention of fair ladies – with pennons and streamers fluttering from castle battlements.
But what is the reality? Were the rituals and romance of chivalry designed to provide an escape from the brutal facts of almost continuous warfare? Or did they instead help regulate the conduct of war and moderate its violent excesses?
Nigel Saul charts the introduction of chivalry by the Normans, the rise of the knightly class as a social elite, the fusion of chivalry with kingship in the fourteenth century and the influence of chivalry on literature, religion and architecture. He shows us a world of kings and barons, castles and cathedrals – a world shaped by Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, by Magna Carta and the rule of law, by battles like Bannockburn and Crecy, by the Black Death and by tournaments, round tables and the cult of Arthurianism.
Structured around the related themes of war, politics and knighthood, For Honour and Fame tells the story of

England

from the Norman Conquest to the aftermath of Henry VII’s triumph at Bosworth in the Wars of the Roses. Wide-ranging, vivid and authoritative, this is the first book to treat chivalry as part of the wider history of medieval

England

The Great Siege: Clash of Empires by William Napier. UK release June 9, 2011. 1565: a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean stands gatekeeper between East and West. It is about to become the scene for one of the most amazing stories of bravery, battle and bloodlust: the siege of

Malta

. Formed in the Holy Land in the 11th century, a small band of knights had long sought a home. Driven from their lands by Ottoman might, they came to rest in

Malta

from where they watched the Turks and corsairs raid the Spanish empire.

As word came from Constantinople that

Malta

was in the sights of the Ottoman Empire, all of Europe watched as a force of over 30,000 men besieged the island - itself only peopled by only 500 knights and a few thousand local soldiers. On that small rock an epic struggle will be played out - the story of individual men, warriors and slaves, but also the story of two worlds colliding.

A brutal combat. A test of courage. A battle that will change history.

Hannibal: Enemy of Rome by Ben Kane. UK release June 9, 2011.

ENEMY OF ROME
The great Carthaginian general, Hannibal, has never forgotten the defeat and humiliation of his father by Rome. Now he plans his revenge and the destruction of the old enemy.
SOLDIER OF CARTHAGE
While Hannibal prepares for war, the young son of one of his most trusted military commanders goes on an innocent adventure with his best friend – and disappears.
SLAVERY
Captured by pirates, put up for sale in the slave market, one of the boys is sold as a gladiator, the other as a field slave. They believe they will never see home or family again.
A WORLD AFLAME
But their destiny – interwoven and linked with that of their Roman masters – is to be an extraordinary one. The devastating war unleashed upon Rome by Hannibal will last for nearly twenty years. It will change their lives – and history – forever.

The First Crusade: The Untold Story by Peter Frankopan. Non-fiction. UK release August 9, 2011.

In 1096 an expedition of extraordinary scale and ambition set off from Western Europe on a mass pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Three years later, after a journey which saw acute hardship, the most severe dangers and thousands of casualties, the knights of the First Crusade found themselves storming the fortifications and capturing the Holy City from its Muslim overlords. Against all the odds, the First Crusade had returned Jerusalem to Christian hands.

The First Crusade is one of the best-known and most written-about events in history. With its themes of the rise of the papacy, the confrontation between Christianity and Islam, the evolution of the concept of holy war, of knightly piety and religious devotion, it is not surprising that the First Crusade has proved enduringly popular, capturing the imagination for centuries.

The First Crusade: The Untold Story is the first book to address the history of the expedition from the perspective of Constantinople. It argues that, contrary to received wisdom, the Byzantine Empire and its ruler – the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos – were facing annihilation on the eve of the Crusade, and that the situation in Asia Minor and in Constantinople had been unravelling rapidly and disastrously from the start of the 1090s. It was for this reason that pleas for military support were made to the papacy, as well as to prominent aristocrats in Western Europe around this time.

In this fascinating and innovative study, Peter Frankopan brilliantly shifts the paradigm and asks vital questions that have never been posed before. Why was there an overwhelming desire to liberate Jerusalem in the mid-1090s? After all, it had been taken by the Muslims nearly 500 years earlier. What were the causes of the Crusade in the east which provoked such an overwhelming response in the west? What role was played by the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople in the genesis and execution of the expedition?

The Women of the Cousins War by Philippa Gregory. Non-fiction. UK release SEptember 15, 2011.

Elizabeth Woodville, The White Queen (2009), Margaret Beaufort, The Red Queen (2010), and Jacquetta, Lady Rivers, The Rivers Woman (2011) are the subjects of the first three novels in Philippa Gregory's Cousins' War series, and of the three biographical essays in this book. Philippa Gregory and two historians, leading experts in their field who helped Philippa to research the novels, tell the extraordinary 'true' stories of the life of these women who until now have been largely forgotten by history, their background and times, highlighting questions which are raised in the fiction and illuminating the novels. With a foreword by Philippa Gregory - in which Philippa writes revealingly about the differences between history and fiction and examines the gaps in the historical record - and beautifully illustrated with rare portraits, The Women of the Cousins' War is an exciting new addition to the Philippa Gregory oeuvre.