Uncommon revolutionary

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Antony Thomas

Cecil Rhodes conquered an area the size of England, Germany, France, and the Low Countries combined, adding a million square miles to Britain's African Empire and lending his name to a new country - Rhodesia. By age thirty-four, Rhodes had founded the DeBeers Company, achieving a worldwide monopoly on diamond production. He went on to earn a second fortune in gold, becoming the richest man in the western world before he was forty. A stalwart patriot and racist, Rhodes laid the foundations of modern apartheid and drew Britain into the bloody Boer War. He mercilessly pinned Africa under his control, believing it England's duty to colonize the world. Today, the monopolies are gone, apartheid is over, and Rhodes, once a hero, has been decried as a racist and imperialist whose only remaining legacy is the scholarship that bears his name. Antony Thomas's biography of Cecil Rhodes is the study of an idealist corrupted by power and of a nation forced under England's control against its will.

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Camilla Townsend

"Camilla Townsend's new book differs from all previous biographies of Pocahontas in capturing how similar seventeenth-century Native Americans were - in the way they saw, understood, and struggled to control their world - not only to the invading English, but also to ourselves." "Neither naive nor innocent, Indians like Pocahontas and her father, the powerful king Powhatan, confronted the vast might of the English with sophistication, diplomacy, and violence. Indeed, Pocahontas's life is a testament to the subtle intelligence that Native Americans, always aware of their material disadvantages, brought against the military power of the colonizing English. Resistance, espionage, collaboration, deception: Pocahontas's life is shown here as a road map of Native American strategies of defiance exercised in the face of overwhelming odds and in the hope of a semblance of independence worth the name." "Townsend's Pocahontas emerges - as a young child on the banks of the Chesapeake, an influential noblewoman visiting a struggling Jamestown, an English gentlewoman in London - for the first time in three dimensions, allowing us to see and sympathize with her people as never before."--BOOK JACKET.

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R.B. Bernstein

Discusses the private life and public career of the fifth president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence.

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written and

A biography of Fiorello La Guardia who started his political career in the House of Representatives before gaining national fame as the mayor of New York City from 1934 to 1945.