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Author: H. W. Brands
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541672534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
"Epic in its scale, fearless in its scope" (Hampton Sides), this masterfully told account of the American West from a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist sets a new standard as it sweeps from the California Gold Rush and beyond. In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame-and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. The West was where riches would reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage, the railroad man's enterprise; but El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East. Balanced, authoritative, and masterfully told, Dreams of El Dorado sets a new standard for histories of the American West.
Author: H. W. Brands
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541672534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Epic in its scale, fearless in its scope" (Hampton Sides), this masterfully told account of the American West from a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist sets a new standard as it sweeps from the California Gold Rush and beyond. In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame-and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. The West was where riches would reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage, the railroad man's enterprise; but El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East. Balanced, authoritative, and masterfully told, Dreams of El Dorado sets a new standard for histories of the American West.
Author: Robert Silverberg
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821441027
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Book Description
One of the most persistent legends in the annals of New World exploration is that of the Land of Gold. This mythical site was located over vast areas of South America (and later, North America); the search for it drove some men mad with greed and, as often as not, to their untimely deaths. In this history of quest and adventure, Robert Silverberg traces the fate of Old World explorers lured westward by the myth of El Dorado. From the German conquistadores licensed by the Spanish king to operate out of Venezuela, to the journeys of Gonzalo Pizarro in the Amazon basin, and to the nearly miraculous voyage of Francisco Orellana to the mouth of the Amazon River, encountering the warlike women who gave the river its name, violence and bloodshed accompanied the determined adventurers. Sir Walter Raleigh and a host of other explorers spent small fortunes and many lives trying to locate Manoa, a city that was rumored to be El Dorado—City of Gold. Celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg recreates these legendary quests in The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado.
Author: Charlotte Rogers
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813942675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 521
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Book Description
What ever happened to the legend of El Dorado, the tale of the mythical city of gold lost in the Amazon jungle? Charlotte Rogers argues that El Dorado has not been forgotten and still inspires the reckless pursuit of illusory wealth. The search for gold in South America during the colonial period inaugurated the "promise of El Dorado"—the belief that wealth and happiness can be found in the tropical forests of the Americas. That assumption has endured over the course of centuries, still evident in the various modes of natural resource extraction, such as oil drilling and mining, that characterize the region today. Mourning El Dorado looks at how fiction from the American tropics written since 1950 engages with the promise of El Dorado in the age of the Anthropocene. Just as the golden kingdom was never found, natural resource extraction has not produced wealth and happiness for the peoples of the tropics. While extractivism enriches a few outsiders, it results in environmental degradation and the subjugation, displacement, and forced assimilation of native peoples. This book considers how the fiction of five writers—Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, Mario Vargas Llosa, Álvaro Mutis, and Milton Hatoum—criticizes extractive practices and mourns the lost illusion of the forest as a place of wealth and happiness.
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307789292
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 427
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Book Description
The Nobel Prize-winning author—and "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angeles Times)—spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian … a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."—The New York Times “Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.” So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum—that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp—which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention. It is the story of a writer’s lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance — language, character, family history — and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: “things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.” What he writes — and what his release of memory enables us to see — is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh’s final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda’s disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator’s own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling.
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0307399974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
Understanding Africa is critical for all concerned with the world today: in what promises to be his final great work of reportage, one of the keenest observers of the continent surveys the effects of belief and religion on the disparate peoples of Africa. The Masque of Africa is Nobel Prize-winning V. S. Naipaul's first major work of non-fiction to be published since his internationally bestselling Beyond Belief. Like all of Naipaul's great works of non-fiction, The Masque of Africa is superficially a book of travels — full of people, stories and landscapes he visits — but it also encompasses a larger narrative and purpose: to judge the effects of belief (whether in indigenous animisms, faiths imposed by other cultures, or even the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of civilization.
Author: Marc Herman
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
From a young writer quickly becoming the quintessential foreign correspondent for a new generation, comes the compelling, tragicomic account of the centuries old quest for gold in South America.
Author: Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Author: V S Naipaul
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1743295995
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
A passionate and vivid recreation of the history of Trinidad. The Loss of El Dorado exposes the barbaric cruelties of slavery and torture and their consequences on all strata of society - from the idealist to the reactionary - in a moving account which penetrates aspects of a complex society more often overlooked by professional historians. It is made up of two forgotten stories - the first being Walter Raleigh's raid on Trinidad and South America in 1595 and ends with his return in 1617, paroled from the Tower of London. The second story occurs nearly two hundred years later - the story of the British-sponsored attempt from the newly captured island of Trinidad to set going a revolution in the Spanish Empire. A brilliantly written narrative history of scandals, betrayal, colonisation and forgotten lands...
Author: Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140052596
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Author: Robert Bothwell
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442612940
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
Robert Bothwell, one of Canada's foremost historians, has told the Eldorado story with colour and drama. He has captured the excitement of frontier resource development in the 1930s and the intrigue of international politics in the 1940s and 1950s.
