|
|
|
The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld
The history of the Barbary Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. If the precious yellow metal hadn't been discovered ... the development of San Francisco's underworld in all likelihood would have been indistinguishable from that of any other large American city. Instead, owing almost entirely to the influx of gold-seekers and the horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians, and other felonious parasites who battened upon them, there arose a unique criminal district that for almost seventy years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour, than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent. The Barbary Coast is Herbert Asbury's classic chronicle of the birth of San Francisco—a violent explosion from which the infant city emerged full-grown and raging wild. From all over the world practitioners of every vice stampeded for the blood and money of the gold fields. Gambling dens ran all day including Sundays. From noon to noon houses of prostitution offered girls of every age and race. (In the 1850s, San Francisco was home to only one woman for every thirty men. It was not until 1910 that the sexes achieved anything close to parity in their populations.) This is the story of the banditry, opium bouts, tong wars, and corruption, from the eureka at Sutter's Mill until the last bagnio closed its doors seventy years later. .
Price: $8.18
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
In Bear Country II: The Barbary Coast
Bear and Pride are leaving their home in the mountains, at least for a little while. Pride dreams of visiting the Pacific Ocean, so they're off to the Barbary Coast, ready to see San Francisco While taking on provisions in Denver, they meet a man named Beckett who asks them to go on something of a quest while they're on their trip. He wants their help to find a missing young man named Jackson Dower. The two men decide to look for Jackson, but they have no idea what they've taken on by agreeing to do the job. There's a lot more to Jackson than meets the eye, and Bear and Pride are in for more than a few surprises. Their search will take them across the prairie and the desert, to the most infamous city in the country. Danger lurks around every corner for Pride and Bear. The past catches up to them, Jackson poses more problems than they really wanted to take on, and Pride ends up wondering if he'll ever be able to see that ocean he's dreamed of for so long. Their journey will test their mettle, and their love. Can Bear and Pride survive their adventure? Find out in Kiernan Kelly's sequel to In Bear Country!.
Price: $11.30
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the Mediterranean from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs, with More than 500 Recipes
To answer the question, "What does Mediterranean mean and what is Mediterranean food" in The Mediterranean Feast, Clifford Wright delves into not merely history, but also agronomy, economics, geography, and more. He dedicates this monumental synthesis of the influences that eventually produced Mediterranean food as we know it to "the philosophers and the cooks." Fortunately, when it seems the intellectuals have taken over completely, one comes on Wright's lyrical description of eating a cassoulet, the golden-crusted, complex French bean stew, and other passages proving that Wright's intense quest for knowledge is based on a cook's culinary passion. Illustrated with maps and brimming with more than 500 recipes, A Mediterranean Feast is Wright's way of leading the reader beyond the popular, romantic image of this region as an eternally bountiful land. He explains how the complex web of influences between the fall of the Roman Empire in the 6th century and the Age of Reason in the 17th century transformed the Mediterranean from a harsh place where poverty and famine made "dying of hunger ... a defining occurrence," to one we could romanticize, seeing it as ever lush with citrus, sun-ripe tomatoes, laden vines, exquisite cheeses, artisanal breads, and simple but well-fed folk. Those who rise to absorb the encyclopedic knowledge and engage with the ideas set forth in this dense work, such as the peasants' willingness to accept new, unfamiliar foods to relieve the boredom and scarcity of subsistence eating, will receive a profound education about Mediterranean life as it historically relates to food. While A Mediterranean Feast feeds the mind, it also offers a wealth of authentic and intriguing dishes from the entire region, from France to Algeria and Spain to the Near East. Readers primarily interested in cooking can flip through this massive book, picking out remarkable recipes such as the pine nut omelet of southern France, Umm Ali, a creamy Egyptian pudding containing phyllo, nuts, coconut, and raisins, and Nohutlu Pilavi, the buttery Turkish pilaf of rice simmered with chickpeas. --Dana Jacobi.
Price: $22.27
[Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World
The history of America’s conflict with the piratical states of the Mediterranean runs through the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison; the adoption of the Constitution; the Quasi-War with France and the War of 1812; the construction of a full-time professional navy; and, most important, the nation’s haltering steps toward commercial independence. Frank Lambert’s genius is to see in the Barbary Wars the ideal means of capturing the new nation’s shaky emergence in the complex context of the Atlantic world. Depicting a time when Britain ruled the seas and France most of Europe, The Barbary Wars proves America’s earliest conflict with the Arabic world was always a struggle for economic advantage rather than any clash of cultures or religions. .
Price: $9.35
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Wars of the Barbary Pirates: To the shores of Tripoli: the birth of the US Navy and Marines (Essential Histories)
|
|
Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800 (Early Modern History)
This is a study that digs deeply into this "other" slavery, the bondage of Europeans by north-African Muslims that flourished during the same centuries as the heyday of the trans-Atlantic trade from sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas. Here are explored--perhaps for the first time--the actual extent of Barbary Coast slavery, the dynamic relationship between master and slave, and the effects of this slaving on Italy, one of the slave takers' primary targets and victims. .
Price: $27.53
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Victory in Tripoli: How America's War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation
At the dawn of a new century, a newly elected U.S. president was forced to confront an escalating series of unprovoked attacks on Americans by Muslim terrorists sworn to carry out jihad against all Western powers. As timely and familiar as these events may seem, they occurred more than two centuries ago. The president was Thomas Jefferson, and the terrorists were the Barbary pirates. Victory in Tripoli recounts the untold story of one of the defining challenges overcome by the young U.S. republic. This fast-moving and dramatic tale examines the events that gave birth to the Navy and the Marines and re-creates the startling political, diplomatic, and military battles that were central to the conflict. This highly interesting and informative history offers deep insight into issues that remain fundamental to U.S. foreign policy decisions to this day..
Price: $13.78
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
BARBARY SLAVESHIP
This is a new book in the ever-popular Barbary stories by Allan Aldiss, which describe the erotic adventures of renegade Rory Fitzgerald in North Africa during the long drawn-out Napoleonic Wars. The very success of the Barbary Pirates, coupled with the simultaneous brutal repression of a revolt in the Sultan's Balkan provinces, have caused a sudden glut in the slave market not on in Marsa but also in Constantinople, Damascus, and Cairo. Accordingly, seeking new sales outlets, the Pasha of Marsa orders Rory to take a shipload of beautiful European women slaves to the Caribbean, to open a new market..
Price: $7.47
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives
It has been said that the Indian captivity narrative, in which kidnapped or captured colonials reported the hardships of imprisonment at the hands of native people, is the first truly American literary genre. In White Slaves, African Masters, historian Paul Baepler shows that this genre had a precursor in the so-called Barbary captivity narrative, in which some unlucky European (or, later, American) describes life as a slave of the Algerian and Moroccan pashas, rulers of the Barbary Coast. Such narratives form part of Cervantes's Don Quixote and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; they also make up a large canon of literary, historical, and autobiographical works that are scarcely known today, even among historians. Yet in their time, these writings were widely circulated. Cotton Mather, the famed New England cleric, used several of them to denounce the Muslims of North Africa, proclaiming from the pulpit that being their prisoner was "the most horrible captivity in the world," and Benjamin Franklin drew on Barbary captivity narratives to decry the slave trade of the Southern United States. In this one-of-a-kind anthology, Baepler gathers several noteworthy examples from American sources, beginning with Cotton Mather's sermons, continuing through post-Revolutionary War writings, such as Jonathan Cowdery's "American Captives in Tripoli" (whose daring rescue by U.S. marines provided us with the phrase "the shores of Tripoli"), and ending with a bogus narrative by one Eliza Bradley, whose 1820 memoir went into 13 U.S. editions. The narratives, Baepler reminds us, point to the long pattern of mutual misunderstanding that has prevailed between the United States and the Muslim world. Read as history and literature, these narratives also help illuminate a dark corner of the past. --Gregory McNamee.
Price: $17.80
[Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
|
|
|