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The Drummer Boys Battle: Florence Nightingale (Trailblazer Books #21)
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A Brief History of the Crimean War: History's Most Unnecessary Struggle
In September 1854, the armies of Britain, France and Turkey invaded Russia in what was to become the Crimean War. In the months that followed over half a million soldiers fell. They died from bullet wounds and shrapnel, cholera and disease, starvation and freezing in a medieval conflict fought in a modern age. But what is rarely appreciated is that this extraordinary struggle was fought not only in the Crimea, but also along the Danube, but in the Arctic Ocean, in the Baltic and Pacific. Few wars in history reveal more confusion of purpose or have had greater unintended consequences. Alexis Troubezkoy's new history traces the causes of this most senseless of wars and sketches a vivid picture of the age which made it possible, interweaving descriptions of the Russian, Turkish and British armies with the principals of the drama — Napoleon III, Marshal St. Arnaud, Lord Raglan, the great Russian engineer Todleban, Florence Nightingale, Nicholas I, and his magnificently terrible Russian empire. .
Price: $9.52
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Crimea: The Great Crimean War, 1854-1856
The mid-19th-century Crimean War, pitting England, France, and less powerful allies against Russia, was one of the first major international wars in history In the execution, it was none too inspiring. As Trevor Royle writes in his sweeping study of the conflict, "it encompassed maladministration on a grand scale and human suffering, if not without parallel then at least minutely recorded by the watching war correspondents"--the war being the first as well to have been widely reported. It was, a contemporary British journal put it, a war of "lions led by donkeys," young men commanded by doddering veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns who served in an unlikely alliance. The English officers, Royle writes, could never shake the habit of calling their French comrades "the enemy," and never quite trusted them, either. The result was carnage: not only the loss of a good portion of the Light Brigade in the most famous--but not the most inept--incident of the war, but also the destruction of whole regiments left to blunder about in the fog and smoke, thanks to their commanders' inadequate intelligence-gathering efforts. Not much changed at war's end. In the eventual peace treaty, France and England and Russia kept their territories more or less intact, and the struggle for power between Russia and the neighboring Ottoman Empire, in whose defense France and England had ostensibly gone to war, stretched out for another generation. It ended with a Russian victory that allowed Russia to assume control of Turkish holdings in the Balkans, which, Royle notes, lay the seeds for still another international conflict, World War I. Royle does a fine job of negotiating through the many complexities, diplomatic and military, of the Crimean War. His descriptions of battlefield tactics (or the lack thereof) are among the best in the literature. More comprehensive than Robert B. Edgerton's Death or Glory: The Legacy of the Crimean War, Royle's Crimea is likely to stand as an enduring work on this strange, wasteful conflict. --Gregory McNamee.
Price: $12.49
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The Great Stink
It takes a world of confidence to name your debut novel The Great Stink, and to set it in a sewer. Not even a modern sewer--charmless though that may be--but the crumbling, cholera-laden, rat-infested, fungus-rich sewers of London in the mid-Victorian period, from which pockets of deadly gas frequently burbled to the surface Clare Clark's unsavory but completely absorbing first novel is a Dantean tour of this reeking underworld and its denizens: both the scavengers--human and animal--and the reformers, who brave the tunnels in the service of public hygiene and social progress after the 1858 Act of Parliament that called for the rebuilding of the sewer system. The Great Stink juxtaposes two darknesses, both embodied in the filthy tunnels: the lawless desperation of the very poor, and the despair of madness. One of the junior engineers most useful in mapping the existing sewer is William May, a studious, methodical veteran of the Crimean War who manages to conceal from everyone but his wife the horrors he brought out of battle with him. The tunnels don't frighten William; they provide isolation and silence for the bloody rites that keep the Mr. Hyde in him at bay. It seems only a matter of time before William's self-destruction turns outward. Long Arm Tom, his counterpart among the poor, is a "tosher." He enters the tunnels illegally, scraping the sludge for coins or other booty, and trapping hundreds of rats for fighting against dogs at local taverns (all the rage for sporting gentlemen since dog fights have been outlawed). Kindness is a liability in Tom's world, but two acts of pity--one toward a dog, and one, more grudgingly, toward William--provide the resistance that changes the course of this otherwise relentlessly dire story. The very weak-stomached may need a cup of mint tea or a bowl of potpourri beside them as they wade through the sewer with Tom and William. Clark has spared readers none of the stink, nor the sharp pleasures of suspense. --ÂRegina Marler.
Price: $2.08
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God's Handmaiden
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Badge of Glory (The Royal Marines Saga)
Travel through Britain's military history with a proud seafaring family, the Blackwoods, and the service tradition in which they make their careers—the Royal Marines Captain Philip Blackwood of the Royal Marines rejoins his ship, the H.M.S. Audacious, in the summer of 1850. Sent out to Africa to eliminate the last strongholds of slavery, then on to the Crimean War. .
Price: $12.71
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Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (Penguin Classics)
Written in 1857, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivaled Florence Nightingale’s during the Crimean War. Seacole traveled widely before arriving in London, where her offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war was met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, she set out independently to the Crimea, where she acted as doctor and “mother” to wounded soldiers while running her business, the “British Hotel.” Told with energy, warmth, and humor, her remarkable life story and accounts of hardships at the battlefront offer significant insights into the history of race politics..
Price: $8.59
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Victors and Lords (Alexander Sheridan Adventures)
Unfairly forced out of the army for insubordination, Alexander Sheridan leaves Britain and his former life behind to command a unit of the East India Company. Despised by the aristocratic generals of the regular army, Sheridan and his corps of volunteers must face both the rigors of combat and the treachery of men who should be allies in the heat of the deadly battles of the Crimean War. .
Price: $2.95
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Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever: A Global Perspective
Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is a tick-borne disease associated with severe hemorrhagic manifestations. CCHF has been referred to as the "Asian Ebola." However, in fact, the disease is one of the most widely distributed tick-borne diseases in the world, occurring in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. This volume covers major aspects of this important disease and the virus which causes it. Chapters are written by leading experts in their fields and detail historical, public health, epidemiological, and clinical aspects of CCHF and the genetics and molecular biology of the virus. Additional chapters focus on disease control, tick vectors and infection among animals, both natural and experimental. This book will be of interest to virologists, microbiologists, medical entomologists, infectious disease physicians, epidemiologists, public health specialists, veterinary scientists, public health policy makers, journalists, and medical educators. .
Price: $138.18
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