Secondhand History & Biography Bargain Book Box SP2721

Secondhand History & Biography Bargain Book Box — 18 Books

A richly varied collection spanning American political history, the Civil Rights movement, imperial China, Stuart England, Renaissance poetry, wartime memoir, and the great figures of Gandhi and Mandela. Garry Wills's Pulitzer Prize-winning analysis of the Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King's own account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott are the twin jewels here — primary documents as much as histories — but the depth throughout is impressive. One title, Valerie Martin's The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, is historical fiction rather than biography, and is noted accordingly.

1. Garry Wills — Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. Wills argues that Lincoln's 272-word address at Gettysburg quietly rewrote the founding principles of the United States — shifting the nation's self-understanding from the Constitution to the Declaration of Independence. A landmark of American intellectual history.
2. Gore Vidal — Palimpsest: A Memoir Vidal was one of the great American literary figures of the twentieth century — novelist, essayist, polemicist, and observer of power. His memoir is characteristically brilliant, indiscreet, and wickedly entertaining: a palimpsest of a life lived at the centre of American cultural and political life.
3. Elizabeth Longford — A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt Longford — the distinguished British biographer of Wellington and Queen Victoria — here turns to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: poet, traveller, breeder of Arabian horses, passionate opponent of British imperialism, and incorrigible romantic. An absorbing life, beautifully told.
4. Yogesh Chadha — Gandhi: A Life A comprehensive and authoritative biography of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — lawyer, activist, spiritual leader, and the man whose philosophy of nonviolent resistance changed the course of the twentieth century. Chadha brings both scholarship and personal engagement to his subject.
5. Andrea Zuvich — A Year in the Life of Stuart Britain A vivid popular history of everyday life in the Stuart period — the food, the fashion, the medicine, the politics, and the extraordinary cast of characters who made the seventeenth century one of England's most turbulent and consequential eras.
6. Valerie Martin — The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (Historical Fiction) Martin's novel takes the most famous maritime mystery in history — the brigantine Mary Celeste, found drifting and abandoned in 1872 with no trace of her crew — and constructs a multi-stranded narrative of obsession, loss, and the stories we tell to explain the inexplicable.
7. William Evans (ed.) — Diary of a Welsh Swagman 1869–1894 A remarkable primary document: the diary of a Welsh immigrant who took to the road in colonial Australia, recording the itinerant life of the swagman with the particular eye of someone who came to it from elsewhere. Abridged and annotated for the modern reader.
8. Harrison E. Salisbury — The New Emperors: Mao & Deng: A Dual Biography Salisbury was one of America's most distinguished foreign correspondents, and this dual biography of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping — the two men who between them shaped modern China — is authoritative, sweeping, and written with a journalist's instinct for the revealing detail.
9. Veronica Buckley — Christina, Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric Christina abdicated the Swedish throne at twenty-seven, converted to Catholicism, and spent the rest of her life scandalising Europe. Buckley's biography of this extraordinary seventeenth-century woman is the definitive account — scholarly, sympathetic, and irresistibly readable.
10. Norman Moss — Picking Up the Reins: America, Britain and the Postwar World An examination of the great postwar transition — the moment when the baton of global power passed from an exhausted Britain to an ascendant America, and how both nations negotiated that transfer with varying degrees of grace.
11. Roger Howell — Sir Philip Sidney: The Shepherd Knight Sidney was the ideal Renaissance man — poet, soldier, courtier, and Protestant hero — who died at thirty-one and became a legend almost immediately. Howell's biography recovers the man behind the myth with careful scholarship and evident affection.
12. Malcolm Munthe — Sweet Is War Munthe — son of the celebrated author of The Story of San Michele — served in British special operations during the Second World War, and this memoir records those experiences with the mixture of courage, dark humour, and reflective intelligence that the title's Erasmus epigram promises.
13. Verdi A concise biographical introduction to one of the giants of opera — the Busseto-born composer whose long career produced Rigoletto, La Traviata, Otello, Aida, and Falstaff, transforming Italian opera and leaving a legacy that has never dimmed.
14. Francis Beckett — Macmillan A critical life of Harold Macmillan — the Conservative Prime Minister who steered Britain through the late 1950s and early 1960s, presided over the "Wind of Change" speech and African decolonisation, and whose patrician ease concealed a more anxious and complicated character than the public persona suggested.
15. Martin Luther King Jr. — Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story King's own account of the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott — the event that launched the Civil Rights movement and made him its leader. A primary historical document written with moral clarity and rhetorical power; essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how the movement began and what sustained it.
16. David James Smith — Young Mandela Smith's biography of Nelson Mandela focuses on the years before imprisonment — the young lawyer, activist, and ANC leader whose transformation into the world's most celebrated political prisoner began here. A valuable complement to Mandela's own memoir.
17. Kenneth C. Davis — A Nation Rising: Untold Tales from America's Hidden History Davis — whose Don't Know Much About History series reached millions of readers — here digs into the episodes and figures that conventional American history has sidelined: the stories that complicate the official narrative and make the past feel genuinely surprising.
18. Geoffrey Blainey — Our Side of the Country: The Story of Victoria Australia's most celebrated popular historian on the state that formed him — from the gold rushes through Federation and beyond. Blainey brings his characteristic clarity, narrative drive, and affection for his subject to a history that reads as compellingly as a novel.