April Blood

Author: Lauro Martines
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195348435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
One of the world's leading historians of Renaissance Italy brings to life here the vibrant--and violent--society of fifteenth-century Florence. His disturbing narrative opens up an entire culture, revealing the dark side of Renaissance man and politician Lorenzo de' Medici. On a Sunday in April 1478, assassins attacked Lorenzo and his brother as they attended Mass in the cathedral of Florence. Lorenzo scrambled to safety as Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor. April Blood moves outward in time and space from that murderous event, unfolding a story of tangled passions, ambition, treachery, and revenge. The conspiracy was led by one of the city's most noble clans, the Pazzi, financiers who feared and resented the Medici's swaggering new role as political bosses--but the web of intrigue spread through all of Italy. Bankers, mercenaries, the Duke of Urbino, the King of Naples, and Pope Sixtus IV entered secretly into the plot. Florence was plunged into a peninsular war, and Lorenzo was soon fighting for his own and his family's survival. The failed assassination doomed the Pazzi. Medici revenge was swift and brutal--plotters were hanged or beheaded, innocents were hacked to pieces, and bodies were put out to dangle from the windows of the government palace. All remaining members of the larger Pazzi clan were forced to change their surname, and every public sign or symbol of the family was expunged or destroyed. April Blood offers us a fresh portrait of Renaissance Florence, where dazzling artistic achievements went side by side with violence, craft, and bare-knuckle politics. At the center of the canvas is the figure of Lorenzo the Magnificent--poet, statesman, connoisseur, patron of the arts, and ruthless "boss of bosses." This extraordinarily vivid account of a turning point in the Italian Renaissance is bound to become a lasting work of history.

Blood Will Tell

Author: April Henry
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805098534
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
"Teen Portland Search and Rescue team member Nick Walker becomes a prime suspect in a murder."--

The Book of Blood and Shadow

Author: Robin Wasserman
Publisher: Ember
ISBN: 0375872779
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
While working on a project translating letters from sixteenth-century Prague, high school senior Nora Kane discovers her best friend murdered with her boyfriend the apparent killer and is caught up in a dangerous web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all searching for a mysterious ancient device purported to allow direct communication with God.

Sugar and Civilization

Author: April Merleaux
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469622521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
In the weeks and months after the end of the Spanish-American War, Americans celebrated their nation's triumph by eating sugar. Each of the nation's new imperial possessions, from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, had the potential for vastly expanding sugar production. As victory parties and commemorations prominently featured candy and other sweets, Americans saw sugar as the reward for their global ambitions. April Merleaux demonstrates that trade policies and consumer cultures are as crucial to understanding U.S. empire as military or diplomatic interventions. As the nation's sweet tooth grew, people debated tariffs, immigration, and empire, all of which hastened the nation's rise as an international power. These dynamics played out in the bureaucracies of Washington, D.C., in the pages of local newspapers, and at local candy counters. Merleaux argues that ideas about race and civilization shaped sugar markets since government policies and business practices hinged on the racial characteristics of the people who worked the land and consumed its products. Connecting the history of sugar to its producers, consumers, and policy makers, Merleaux shows that the modern American sugar habit took shape in the shadow of a growing empire.

The Blood of Government

Author: Paul Alexander Kramer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807829854
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 554

Book Description
In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their co

Blood of Dragons

Author: Robin Hobb
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062116878
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
The final volume in Robin Hobb's popular Rain Wilds fantasy series, Blood of Dragons completes the story of the dragons, their keepers, and their quest to find the lost city of Kelsingra—and the mythical silver wells that the dragons need to survive. Can Tintaglia and the Elderlings unlock the secrets of the ancient city? Or are they doomed to extinction? The world of Robin Hobb’s Rain Wilds series has been praised by Booklist as "one of the most gripping settings in modern fantasy," and Publishers Weekly called the Rain Wilds books "a meticulously realized fantasy tale" and "a welcome addition to contemporary dragon lore."

Blood Meridian

Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307762521
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

Captain Blood

Author: Rafael Sabatini
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486112993
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Physician and country gentleman Peter Blood is forced to turn from medicine to piracy in this swashbuckling classic brimming with stolen treasure, adventure on the high seas, and romance.

One Blood

Author: Spencie Love
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863068
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Book Description
One Blood traces both the life of the famous black surgeon and blood plasma pioneer Dr. Charles Drew and the well-known legend about his death. On April 1, 1950, Drew died after an auto accident in rural North Carolina. Within hours, rumors spread: the man who helped create the first American Red Cross blood bank had bled to death because a whites-only hospital refused to treat him. Drew was in fact treated in the emergency room of the small, segregated Alamance General Hospital. Two white surgeons worked hard to save him, but he died after about an hour. In her compelling chronicle of Drew's life and death, Spencie Love shows that in a generic sense, the Drew legend is true: throughout the segregated era, African Americans were turned away at hospital doors, either because the hospitals were whites-only or because the 'black beds' were full. Love describes the fate of a young black World War II veteran who died after being turned away from Duke Hospital following an auto accident that occurred in the same year and the same county as Drew's. African Americans are shown to have figuratively 'bled to death' at white hands from the time they were first brought to this country as slaves. By preserving their own stories, Love says, they have proven the enduring value of oral history. General Interest/Race Relations

Blood Knots

Author: Luke Jennings
Publisher: Skyhorse
ISBN: 1620872951
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
Blood Knots is a brilliant and dramatic memoir of an angler’s life. It places Jennings in the front rank of natural history writers. As a child in the 1960s, he was fascinated by the rivers and lakes around his home. Beneath their surfaces waited alien and mysterious worlds. With library books as his guide, he applied himself to the task of learning to fish. His progress was slow, and for years, he caught nothing. But then a series of teachers presented themselves, including an inspirational young intelligence officer, from whom he learned stealth, deception, and the art of dry-fly fishing. So began an enlightening but often dark-shadowed journey of discovery. It would lead to bright streams and wild country, but would end with his mentor’s capture, torture, and execution by the IRA. Blood Knots is about angling, about great fish caught and lost, but it is also about friendship, honor, and coming of age. As an adult, Jennings has sought out lost and secretive waterways, probing waters at dead of night in search of giant pike. The quest, as always, is for more than the living quarry. For only by searching far beneath the surface, he suggests in this most moving and thought-provoking of memoirs, can you connect with your own deep history. Jennings offers here a striking, elegiac narrative for lovers of unique memoirs and the finest fly-fishing literature.