Author: Emma Donoghue
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547630360
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Emma Donoghue vividly brings to life stories inspired by her discoveries of fascinating, hidden scraps of the past. Here an engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits, a plague ballad, surgical case notes, theological pamphlets, and an articulated skeleton are ingeniously fleshed out into rollicking, full-bodied fictions. Whether she's spinning the tale of an English soldier tricked into marrying a dowdy spinster, a Victorian surgeon's attempts to "improve" women, a seventeenth-century Irish countess who ran away to Italy disguised as a man, or an "undead" murderess returning for the maid she left behind to be executed in her place, Emma Donoghue brings to her tales a colorful, elegant prose filled with the sights and smells and sounds of the period. She summons the ghosts of those men and women who counted for nothing in their own day and brings them to unforgettable life in fiction.
Author: Karen Harvey
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198734883
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
In September 1726, Mary Toft was found to have given birth to seventeen rabbits in Godalming, Surrey. The case caused a sensation and was reported widely in newspapers, popular pamphlets, poems and caricatures.
Author: Dexter Clarence Palmer
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1101871938
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
John cannot explain how or why Mary Toft, the wife of a local journeyman, has managed to give birth to a dead rabbit. John and Zachary realize that nothing in their experience as rural physicians has prepared them to deal with a situation like this. When King George I learns of Mary's plight, she and her doctors are summoned to London
Author: Emma Donoghue
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156007474
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
Mary Saunders' lust for linen, lace and a shiny red ribbon leads her to a life of prostitution.
Author: John Maubray
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3368926497
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
Reproduction of the original.
Author: Clifford A. Pickover
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615926100
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
This can justifiably be called history''s most fascinating medical mystery, a dark, true-life Alice in Wonderland tale with a streak of horror. Why should we care today about a poor, eighteenth-century girl who gave birth to monstrosities? Mary Toft''s story bears uncanny parallels with our own time and contains perennial themes: science and superstition separated by the flimsiest of curtains, justice and morality, crime and punishment, and the greed and basic fears at the core of human nature. Prepare yourself for a shattering odyssey as acclaimed polymath Clifford Pickover takes you to the ultimate frontier of medical speculation. With numerous illustrations, this is an engrossing and thoroughly unique introduction to eighteenth-century science and its metaphor for today''s scientific superstitions and politics. For Mary, conspiracies are everywhere, the line between good and evil lost, and the consequences exceed her most unthinkable, private desires.
Author: Jonathan Eig
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245942
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
A Chicago Tribune "Best Books of 2014" • A Slate "Best Books 2014: Staff Picks" • A St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Best Books of 2014" The fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid. Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.
Author: Heather Cox Richardson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190900911
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.
Author: Dennis Todd
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226805559
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to 17 rabbits. This study recreates the story of this incident and shows how it illuminates 18th-century beliefs about the power of imagination and the problems of personal identity.
Author: Anna North
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635575435
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK * INDIE NEXT SELECTION * LIBRARY READS SELECTION * AMAZON EDITORS' CHOICE * WASHINGTON POST BEST OF THE YEAR The "terrifying, wise, tender, and thrilling" (R.O. Kwon) adventure story of a fugitive girl, a mysterious gang of robbers, and their dangerous mission to transform the Wild West. In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw. The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada's life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows. She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all. Featuring an irresistibly no-nonsense, courageous, and determined heroine, Outlawed dusts off the myth of the old West and reignites the glimmering promise of the frontier with an entirely new set of feminist stakes. Anna North has crafted a pulse-racing, page-turning saga about the search for hope in the wake of death, and for truth in a climate of small-mindedness and fear.
