Fawn M. Brodie - Böcker

" . . . offers the quickest way I know to acquire the basic historical background that we ought all to have." —Louis J. Halle, SurvivalThis classic in the field of military history covers weaponry from Archimedes' catapult down to MIRV and the ABM, emphasizes the contributions of science to warfare, and includes an extensive new chapter on the weapons of the nuclear age.

In this biography of the chief architect of Reconstruction after the Civil War, Fawn Brodie seeks to explain the basis for his actions, the nature of his economic radicalism, and the emotional forces that resulted in his becoming one of the most controversial figures in American history. She describes his roles as father of the Fourteenth Amendment and prosecutor in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, his relations with Lincoln, and his battles for black suffrage and schooling.

Starting in a hollowed log of wood—some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself "Why?" and the only echo is "damned fool! . . . the Devil drives!"So Richard Francis Burton, preparing for an exploration of the lower Congo in 1863, wrote to Monckton Milnes from the African kingdom of Dahomey. His answer, "the Devil drives," applies not only to his geographical discoveries but also to the whole of his turbulent life.Burton was a true man of the Renaissance. He was soldier, explorer, ethnologist, archaeologist, poet, translator, and one of the two or three great linguists of his time. He was also an amateur physician, a botanist, a geologist, a swordsman, and a superb raconteur. He penetrated the sacred Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina at great risk and explored the forbidden city of Harar in Somaliland. He searched for the sources of the White Nile and discovered Lake Tanganyika.Burton's passion was not only for geographical discovery but also for the hidden in man. His enormous erudition on the sexual customs of the East and Africa, long confined by the pruderies of his time, finally found expression in the notes and commentary to his celebrated translation of the unexpurgated Arabian Nights.For this major biography of one of the most baffling heroes of any era, Fawn M. Brodie has drawn on original sources and a newly discovered collection of letters and papers.

With a novelist’s skill and a scholar’s meticulous detail, Fawn M. Brodie portrays Thomas Jefferson as he wrestled with the great issues of his time: revolution, religion, power, race, and love—ambivalences that exerted a subtle but powerful influence on his political ideas and his presidency. Far advanced for its time, Brodie’s biography was the first to set forth a convincing case that Thomas Jefferson was the father of children by his slave Sally Hemings. In a new introduction, Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, explores the impact of Brodie’s groundbreaking book and explains why it is still such a powerful account of one of our greatest and most elusive presidents.