Julius Caesar

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Margaret A. Oppenheimer

"Born Betsy Bowen into grinding poverty, the woman who became Eliza Jumel was raised in a brothel, indentured as a servant, and confined to a workhouse when her mother was in jail. Yet by the end of her life, "Madame Jumel" was one of America's richest women, with servants of her own, a New York mansion and Saratoga Springs summer home, a major art collection, and several hundred acres of land. During her remarkable rise, she acquired a fortune from her first husband--a French merchant--and almost lost it to her second--notorious vice president Aaron Burr. Divorcing Burr amid lurid charges of adultery, Jumel lived on to the age of 90, astutely managing her property and public persona. After her death, a titanic battle over her estate went all the way to the United States Supreme Court--twice. Family members told of a woman who earned the gratitude of Napoleon I and shone at the courts of Louis XVIII and Charles X. Claimants to her estate painted a different picture: of a prostitute, the mother of George Washington's illegitimate son, a wife who defrauded her husband and perhaps even plotted his death. Eliza Jumel's real story--so unique that it surpasses any invention--has yet to be told, until now. "--

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Desmond and Jean Bowen

"It is a curious paradox that, while for many centuries there has been deep antagonism between the British and the Irish, the latter have fought the former's wars with exemplary courage and tenacity. This has never been better demonstrated than when, as a result of the Irish regiments' superb service in the South African War (Boer War) at the end of the 19th Century, Queen Victoria ordered the formation of the Irish Guards in 1900 as a mark of the Nation's gratitude. Even after the trauma of Partition, Irishmen continued to serve in Irish regiments in large numbers and the tradition continued today. Indeed during the Second World War a very significant number of the most influential generals were of Irish extraction."--Publisher's description.

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Edward Gregg

The reign of Queen Anne was a period of significant progress for the country, but the Queen has received little credit for these achievements. This biography seeks to shatter the image of a weak and ineffective monarch.

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Christopher Nicole

Lord Byron was the most famous, the most scandalous, and most admired man in England early in the 19th century, for love affairs with his boyhood nurse, his half-sister, and numerous married women of aristocracy, not to mention prostitutes, servants, and even homosexuals, but he was also a great poet, satirist, and traveler. After Byron's death in 1824 his memoirs were burned as they were considered too scandalous. 150 years later, this novel's author imagine that he found in Greece an ancient manuscript in Byron's handwriting which could be the long lost memoirs. While this book is an ingenious literary fiction, it remains a vivid and bawdy recreation of Byron's life.