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Forging Capitalism
by Ian KlausVice is endemic to Western capitalism, according to this fascinating, wildly entertaining, often startling history of modern finance. Ian Klaus's Forging Capitalism demonstrates how international financial affairs in the nineteenth century were conducted not only by gentlemen as a noble pursuit but also by connivers, thieves, swindlers, and frauds who believed that no risk was too great and no scheme too outrageous if the monetary reward was substantial enough. Taken together, the grand deceptions of the ambitious schemers and the determined efforts to guard against them have been instrumental in creating the financial establishments of today. In a story teeming with playboys and scoundrels and rich in colorful and amazing events, Klaus chronicles the evolution of trust through three distinct epochs: the age of values, the age of networks and reputations, and, ultimately, in a world of increased technology and wealth, the age of skepticism and verification. In today's world, where the questionable dealings of large international financial institutions are continually in the spotlight, this extraordinary history has great relevance, offering essential lessons in both the importance and the limitations of trust.
Forging China's Military Might: A New Framework for Assessing Innovation
by Tai Ming Cheung“His collection of nine essays offers a comprehensive and insightful assessment of the Chinese defense science and technology (S&T).” —Pacific AffairsAmong the most important issues in international security today are the nature and the global implications of China’s emergence as a world-class defense technology power. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Chinese defense industry has reinvented itself by emphasizing technological innovation and technology. This reinvention and its potential effects, both positive and negative, are attracting global scrutiny. Drawing insights from a range of disciplines, including history, social science, business, and strategic studies, Tai Ming Cheung and the contributors to Forging China’s Military Might develop an analytical framework to evaluate the nature, dimensions, and spectrum of Chinese innovation in the military and broader defense spheres.Forging China’s Military Might provides an overview of the current state of the Chinese defense industry and then focuses on subjects critical to understanding short- and long-term developments, including the relationship among defense contractors, regulators, and end-users; civil-military integration; China’s defense innovation system; and China’s place in the global defense economy. Case studies look in detail at the Chinese space and missile industry.“Constitutes high-quality, cutting-edge research on China’s defense industries. It should enjoy broad appeal—among academics, policy makers, security analysts, and business people in countries around the world.” —Andrew Scobell, RAND Corporation“Forging China’s Military Might belongs in any political science shelf interested in China’s issues and international security and considers the nature of China’s emergence as a world power.” —Midwest Book Review
Forging Diaspora: Afro-cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow
by Frank Andre GuridyCuba's geographic proximity to the United States and its centrality to U. S. imperial designs following the War of 1898 led to the creation of a unique relationship between Afro-descended populations in the two countries. In Forging Diaspora, Frank Andre Guridy shows that the cross-national relationships nurtured by Afro-Cubans and black Americans helped to shape the political strategies of both groups as they attempted to overcome a shared history of oppression and enslavement. Drawing on archival sources in both countries, Guridy traces four encounters between Afro-Cubans and African Americans. These hidden histories of cultural interaction--of Cuban students attending Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, the rise of Garveyism, the Havana-Harlem cultural connection during the Harlem Renaissance and Afro-Cubanism movement, and the creation of black travel networks during the Good Neighbor and early Cold War eras--illustrate the significance of cross-national linkages to the ways both Afro-descended populations negotiated the entangled processes of U. S. imperialism and racial discrimination. As a result of these relationships, argues Guridy, Afro-descended peoples in Cuba and the United States came to identify themselves as part of a transcultural African diaspora.
Forging Europe: Industrial Organisation in France, 1940–1952
by Luc-André BrunetThis book is a detailed and original look at the radical reorganisation of French heavy industry in the turbulent period between the establishment of the Vichy regime in 1940 and the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the forerunner to the European Union, in 1952. By studying institutions ranging from Vichy’s Organisation Committees to Jean Monnet’s Commissariat Général du Plan (CGP), Luc-André Brunet challenges existing narratives and reveals significant continuities from Vichy to post-war initiatives such as the Monnet Plan and the ECSC. Based on extensive multi-archival research, this book sheds important new light on economic collaboration and resistance in Vichy, the post-war revival of the French economy, and the origins of European integration.
Forging Freedom
by Amrita Chakrabarti MyersFor black women in antebellum Charleston, freedom was not a static legal category but a fragile and contingent experience. In this deeply researched social history, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers analyzes the ways in which black women in Charleston acquired, defined, and defended their own vision of freedom. Drawing on legislative and judicial materials, probate data, tax lists, church records, family papers, and more, Myers creates detailed portraits of individual women while exploring how black female Charlestonians sought to create a fuller freedom by improving their financial, social, and legal standing. Examining both those who were officially manumitted and those who lived as free persons but lacked official documentation, Myers reveals that free black women filed lawsuits and petitions, acquired property (including slaves), entered into contracts, paid taxes, earned wages, attended schools, and formed familial alliances with wealthy and powerful men, black and white--all in an effort to solidify and expand their freedom. Never fully free, black women had to depend on their skills of negotiation in a society dedicated to upholding both slavery and patriarchy. Forging Freedom examines the many ways in which Charleston's black women crafted a freedom of their own design instead of accepting the limited existence imagined for them by white Southerners.
Forging Freedom in W. E. B. Du Bois's Twilight Years: No Deed but Memory (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies)
by Phillip Luke SinitiereContributions by Murali Balaji, Charisse Burden-Stelly, Christopher Cameron, Carlton Dwayne Floyd, Robert Greene II, Andre E. Johnson, Werner Lange, Lisa J. McLeod, Jodi Melamed, Tyler Monson, Eric Porter, Reiland Rabaka, Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, Camesha Scruggs, and Phillip Luke Sinitiere Although the career of W. E. B. Du Bois was remarkable in its entirety, a large majority of scholarship focuses on the first five or six decades. Overlooked and understudied, the closing three decades of Du Bois’s career reflect a generative period of his life in terms of teaching, travel, activism, and publications. Forging Freedom in W. E. B. Du Bois's Twilight Years: No Deed but Memory proposes to narrate the political, social, and cultural significance of Du Bois’s career during the controversial closing three decades of his life. Du Bois’s twilight years were tremendously controversial: his persistent criticism of the collusion between capitalism and racism and his choice to join the Communist Party in late 1961 raised the ire of many. At the time, Du Bois’s strident advocacy of socialism and turn to communism during the Cold War oriented most scholars away from delving into his late career. While only a few scholars have engaged the productivity of Du Bois’s later years, the fact is that an anticommunist, antiradical animus has followed Du Bois in the half century since his death. As a result, Du Bois scholarship remains impoverished to the extent that academics neglect his later years. The essays in Forging Freedom in W. E. B. Du Bois's Twilight Years detail selected aspects of Du Bois’s later decades and their particular connection to American social, political, and cultural history between the 1930s and the 1960s. While international concerns and a global perspective also fundamentally defined Du Bois’s latter years, chronicling his final decades in a US context presents fresh insight into his twilight years. Du Bois’s commitment to freedom’s flourishing during this period animated the Black freedom struggle’s war against white supremacy. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the durability of Du Bois’s intellectual achievements remains relevant to the twenty-first century.
Forging Freedom: A True Story of Heroism During the Holocaust
by Hudson TalbottJaap Penraat has always felt a little Jewish growing up in Amsterdam in the 1930s. His hometown is one of the great Jewish centers of Europe -- until the German forces arrive at the outbreak of World War II and begin targeting the Jewish community. Jaap's instincts are to protect his Jewish friends and neighbors from Nazi persecution, and he sets to work making fake ID cards for them. As the war progresses and the Nazis turn his beloved Amsterdam into a death trap for Jews, Jaap realizes he must take a more drastic action. The scheme he devises requires two things for it to succeed: outsmarting the Nazis at their own game and having nerves of steel. The hardest part for him is not just risking his own life, but deciding which other lives he dares to risk, if he is to save them. Hudson Talbott gives us a dramatic account of a man who knew he must act against these dark forces. As Jaap has said, "You do these things because in your mind there is no other way of doing it".
Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840
by Gary B. NashThis book is the first to trace the good and bad fortunes, over more than a century, of the earliest large free black community in the United States. Gary Nash shows how, from colonial times through the Revolution and into the turbulent 1830s, blacks in the City of Brotherly Love struggled to shape a family life, gain occupational competence, organize churches, establish neighborhoods and social networks, advance cultural institutions, educate their children in schools, forge a political consciousness, and train black leaders who would help abolish slavery. These early generations of urban blacks--many of them newly emancipated--constructed a rich and varied community life. Nash's account includes elements of both poignant triumph and profound tragedy. Keeping in focus both the internal life of the black community and race relations in Philadelphia generally, he portrays first the remarkable vibrancy of black institution-building, ordinary life, and relatively amicable race relations, and then rising racial antagonism. The promise of a racially harmonious society that took form in the postrevolutionary era, involving the integration into the white republic of African people brutalized under slavery, was ultimately unfulfilled. Such hopes collapsed amid racial conflict and intensifying racial discrimination by the 1820s. This failure of the great and much-watched "Philadelphia experiment" prefigured the course of race relations in America in our own century, an enduringly tragic part of this country's past.
Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order (America in the World #40)
by Stefan J. LinkA new global history of Fordism from the Great Depression to the postwar eraAs the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. Forging Global Fordism traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. This incisive book recovers the crucial role of activist states in global industrial transformations and reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order.Stefan Link uncovers the forgotten origins of Fordism in Midwestern populism, and shows how Henry Ford's antiliberal vision of society appealed to both the Soviet and Nazi regimes. He explores how they positioned themselves as America's antagonists in reaction to growing American hegemony and seismic shifts in the global economy during the interwar years, and shows how Detroit visitors like William Werner, Ferdinand Porsche, and Stepan Dybets helped spread versions of Fordism abroad and mobilize them in total war.Forging Global Fordism challenges the notion that global mass production was a product of post–World War II liberal internationalism, demonstrating how it first began in the global thirties, and how the spread of Fordism had a distinctly illiberal trajectory.
Forging Leninism in China: Mao and the Remaking of the Chinese Communist Party, 1927–1934
by Joseph FewsmithForging Leninism in China is a re-examination of the events of the Chinese revolution and the transformation of the Chinese Communist Party from the years 1927 to 1934. Describing the transformation of the party as 'the forging of Leninism', Joseph Fewsmith offers a clear analysis of the development of the party. Drawing on supporting statements of party leaders and a wealth of historical material, he demonstrates how the Chinese Communist Party reshaped itself to become far more violent, more hierarchical, and more militarized during this time. He highlights the role of local educated youth in organizing the Chinese revolution, arguing that it was these local organizations, rather than Mao, who introduced Marxism into the countryside. Fewsmith presents a vivid story of local social history and conflict between Mao's revolutionaries and local Communists.
Forging Napoleon's Grande Armée: Motivation, Military Culture, and Masculinity in the French Army, 1800-1808 (Warfare and Culture #7)
by Michael J Hughes&“A fascinating study exploring the motivation of French soldiers during the Napoleonic Era, and the process through which they became Napoleon&’s men.&”—Frederick C. Schneid, author of Napoleon&’s Conquest of Europe The men who fought in Napoleon&’s Grande Armée built a new empire that changed the world. Remarkably, the same men raised arms during the French Revolution for liberté, égalité, and fraternité. In just over a decade, these freedom fighters, who had once struggled to overthrow tyrants, rallied to the side of a man who wanted to dominate Europe. What was behind this drastic change of heart? In this ground-breaking study, Michael J. Hughes shows how Napoleonic military culture shaped the motivation of Napoleon&’s soldiers. Relying on extensive archival research and blending cultural and military history, Hughes demonstrates that the Napoleonic regime incorporated elements from both the Old Regime and French Revolutionary military culture to craft a new military culture, characterized by loyalty to both Napoleon and the preservation of French hegemony in Europe. Underscoring this new, hybrid military culture were five sources of motivation: honor, patriotism, a martial and virile masculinity, devotion to Napoleon, and coercion. Forging Napoleon&’s Grande Armée vividly illustrates how this many-pronged culture gave Napoleon&’s soldiers reasons to fight. &“Hughes offers a tight and well-grounded exposition and analysis of French military culture in the Napoleonic period in which military honour is presented as a dynamic element.&” —Journal of European Studies &“Hughes&’s book not only contributes to our understanding of the military success of Napoleon&’s army, but also elegantly employs cultural history methods to better understand army operations and sustained troop motivations.&” —Julia Osman, History: Reviews of New Book
Forging Romantic China
by Peter J. KitsonThe first major cultural study to focus exclusively on this decisive period in modern British-Chinese relations. Based on extensive archival investigations, Peter J. Kitson shows how British knowledge of China was constructed from the writings and translations of a diverse range of missionaries, diplomats, travellers, traders, and literary men and women during the Romantic period. The new perceptions of China that it gave rise to were mediated via a dynamic print culture to a diverse range of poets, novelists, essayists, dramatists and reviewers, including Jane Austen, Thomas Percy, William Jones, S. T. Coleridge, George Colman, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, William and Dorothy Wordsworth and others, informing new British understandings and imaginings of China on the eve of the Opium War of 1839–42. Kitson aims to restore China to its true global presence in our understandings of the culture and literature of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Forging Shoah Memories
by Stefania LucamanteDespite an outpouring in recent years of history and cultural criticism related to the Holocaust, Italian women's literary representations and testimonies have not received their proper due. This project fills this gap by analyzing Italian women's writing from a variety of genres, all set against a complex historical backdrop.
Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)
by Devi MaysForging Ties, Forging Passports is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas—and especially to Mexico—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new homes. Mays considers the shifting notions of belonging, nationality, and citizenship through the stories of individual women, men, and families who navigated these transitions in their everyday lives, as well as through the paperwork they carried. In the aftermath of World War I and the Mexican Revolution, migrants traversed new layers of bureaucracy and authority amid shifting political regimes as they crossed and were crossed by borders. Ottoman Sephardi migrants in Mexico resisted unequivocal classification as either Ottoman expatriates or Mexicans through their links to the Sephardi diaspora in formerly Ottoman lands, France, Cuba, and the United States. By making use of commercial and familial networks, these Sephardi migrants maintained a geographic and social mobility that challenged the physical borders of the state and the conceptual boundaries of the nation.
Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War
by John DeakThe Habsburg Monarchy ruled over approximately one-third of Europe for almost 150 years. Previous books on the Habsburg Empire emphasize its slow decline in the face of the growth of neighboring nation-states. John Deak, instead, argues that the state was not in eternal decline, but actively sought not only to adapt, but also to modernize and build. Deak has spent years mastering the structure and practices of the Austrian public administration and has immersed himself in the minutiae of its codes, reforms, political maneuverings, and culture. He demonstrates how an early modern empire made up of disparate lands connected solely by the feudal ties of a ruling family was transformed into a relatively unitary, modern, semi-centralized bureaucratic continental empire. This process was only derailed by the state of emergency that accompanied the First World War. Consequently, Deak provides the reader with a new appreciation for the evolving architecture of one of Europe's Great Powers in the long nineteenth century.
Forging a President: How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt
by William Hazelgrove"There are few sensations I prefer to that of galloping over these rolling limitless prairies, with rifle in hand, or winding my way among the barren, fantastic and grimly picturesque deserts of the so-called Bad Lands." —Theodore Roosevelt <P><P>He was born a city boy in Manhattan; but it wasn't until he lived as a cattle rancher and deputy sheriff in the wild country of the Dakota Territory that Theodore Roosevelt became the man who would be president. "I have always said I would not have been president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota," Roosevelt later wrote. <P><P>It was in the "grim fairyland" of the Bad Lands that Roosevelt became acquainted with the ways of cowboys, Native Americans, trappers, thieves, and wild creatures--and it was there that his spirit was forged and tested. <P><P>In Forging a President, author William Hazelgrove uses Roosevelt's own reflections to immerse readers in the formative seasons that America's twenty-sixth president spent in "the broken country" of the Wild West.
Forging a Unitary State: Russia’s Management of the Eurasian Space, 1650–1850
by John P. LeDonneCovering two centuries of Russian history, Forging a Unitary State is a comprehensive account of the creation of what is commonly known as the "Russian Empire," from Poland to Siberia. In this book, John P. LeDonne demonstrates that the so-called empire was, for the most part, a unitary state, defined by an obsessive emphasis on centralization and uniformity. The standardization of local administration, the judicial system, tax regime, and commercial policy were carried out slowly but systematically over eight generations, in the hope of integrating people on the periphery into the Russian political and social hierarchy. The ultimate goal of Russian policy was to create a "Fortress Empire" consisting of a huge Russian unitary state flanked by a few peripheral territories, such as Finland, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia. Additional peripheral states, such as Sweden, Turkey, and Persia, would guarantee the security of this "Fortress Empire," and the management of Eurasian territory. LeDonne’s provocative argument is supported by a careful comparative study of Russian expansion along its western, southern, and eastern borders, drawing on vital but under-studied administrative evidence. Forging a Unitary State is an essential resource for those interested in the long history of Russian expansionism.
Forging the American Nation, 1787-1791
by Shlomo SlonimThis book presents an original historical-legal analysis of the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Drawing upon James Madison's own minutes of the 1787 Convention, it focuses on Madison's crucial role in shaping a bill of rights that would both reserve the states' powers and confirm the implied powers doctrine for the federal government. This comprehensive work is indispensable for understanding the origins of the federal system of government and its impact on later developments in the United States.
Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)
by Max OidtmannIn 1995, the People’s Republic of China resurrected a Qing-era law mandating that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn. The Chinese Communist Party hoped to limit the ability of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile to independently identify reincarnations. In so doing, they elevated a long-forgotten ceremony into a controversial symbol of Chinese sovereignty in Tibet.In Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann ventures into the polyglot world of the Qing empire in search of the origins of the golden urn tradition. He seeks to understand the relationship between the Qing state and its most powerful partner in Inner Asia—the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism. Why did the Qianlong emperor invent the golden urn lottery in 1792? What ability did the Qing state have to alter Tibetan religious and political traditions? What did this law mean to Qing rulers, their advisors, and Tibetan Buddhists? Working with both the Manchu-language archives of the empire’s colonial bureaucracy and the chronicles of Tibetan elites, Oidtmann traces how a Chinese bureaucratic technology—a lottery for assigning administrative posts—was exported to the Tibetan and Mongolian regions of the Qing empire and transformed into a ritual for identifying and authenticating reincarnations. Forging the Golden Urn sheds new light on how the empire’s frontier officers grappled with matters of sovereignty, faith, and law and reveals the role that Tibetan elites played in the production of new religious traditions in the context of Qing rule.
Forging the Kingdom: Power in English Society, 973–1189
by Green Judith A.Between the imperial coronation of Edgar in 973 and the death of Henry II in 1189, English society was transformed. This lively and wide-ranging study explores social and political change in England across this period, and examines the reasons for such developments, as well as the many continuities. By putting the events of 1066 firmly in the middle of her account, Judith Green casts new light on the significance of the Norman Conquest. She analyses the changing ways that kings, lords and churchmen exercised power, especially through the building of massive stone cathedrals and numerous castles, and highlights the importance of London as the capital city. The book also explores themes such as changes in warfare, the decline of slavery and the integration of the North and South West, as well as concepts such as state, nationalism and patriarchy.
Forging the Modern World: A History
by Richard Warren James Carter<p>In Forging the Modern World: A History, Second Edition, authors James Carter and Richard Warren offer an accessible explanation of key transformations in global economic, political, and ideological relationships since the sixteenth century. The book is distinct from most world history texts in three important ways. <p>First, it explores the ways in which historians use and produce information. Each chapter delves deeply into one or two specific issues of historical inquiry related to the chapter theme, showing how new primary sources, methodologies, or intellectual trends have changed how we engage with the past. Second, it clearly explains the political, economic, and ideological concepts that students need to understand in order to compare events and trends across time and space. Finally, the chapters are organized around global historical themes, which are explored through an array of conceptual and comparative lenses. <p>While the book chapters proceed chronologically, each chapter is written with some chronological overlap linking it to preceding and subsequent chapters. This strategy emphasizes the interconnectedness between the events and themes of one chapter and those of surrounding chapters.</p>
Forging the Past
by Katrina B. OldsSpain's infamous "false chronicles" were alleged to have been unearthed in 1595 in a monastic library deep in the heart of the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire by the Jesuit priest Jerónimo Román de la Higuera. Though rife with anachronisms and chronological inaccuracies, these four volumes of invented "truths" about Spanish sacred history radically transformed the religious landscape in Counter-Reformation Spain and were not definitively exposed as forgeries until centuries later, after nearly two hundred years of scholarly debate. In this fascinating study, Katrina B. Olds explores the history, author, and legacy of one of the world's most compelling and consequential frauds. The book examines how a relatively obscure Jesuit priest so successfully fabricated a set of supposedly historical documents that they were accepted as authentic for generation after generation. The chronicles' influence was so powerful, in fact, that they continued to shape scholarly discourse, religious practice, and local heritage throughout Spain well into the twentieth century, despite having been debunked as forgeries in the eighteenth. Olds's fascinating analysis brings together intellectual, cultural, religious, and political history while reinvigorating an ongoing debate on the uses and abuses of history and the nature of historical and religious truth.
Forging the Sword
by Hilari BellTHE SPIRIT OF THE ANCIENT CHAMPION, SORAHB, WAS REBORN INTO THE BODY OF A DEGHAN YOUTH. There is not much time left on the Hrum's self-imposed limit -- only a few months. If in that time they don't take all of Farsala, then the Farsalans will regain their independence. Ceaselessly, Soraya, Kavi, and Jiaan work to keep control of what little land remains free from Hrum rule: parts of the countryside, the badlands, and the walled city of Mazad. They have many people helping them, but there is still one important piece missing: a sword that is able to withstand the Hrum's watersteel. In the end Farsala will fall if it can't win in battle. But one thing none of these young heroes can foresee is the growing desperation of the Hrum leaders. It will lead some to break their own laws and sacred pacts and will reveal truths to Kavi, Soraya, and Jiaan about the nature of war, the nature of human beings, and -- most importantly -- the nature of themselves. Hilari Bell builds the action and intrigue to a crescendo in the final installment of this critically acclaimed trilogy.
Forging the Sword (Farsala #3)
by Hilari BellTHE SPIRIT OF THE ANCIENT CHAMPION, SORAHB, WAS REBORN INTO THE BODY OF A DEGHAN YOUTH. There is not much time left on the Hrum's self-imposed limit -- only a few months. If in that time they don't take all of Farsala, then the Farsalans will regain their independence. Ceaselessly, Soraya, Kavi, and Jiaan work to keep control of what little land remains free from Hrum rule: parts of the countryside, the badlands, and the walled city of Mazad. They have many people helping them, but there is still one important piece missing: a sword that is able to withstand the Hrum's watersteel. In the end Farsala will fall if it can't win in battle. But one thing none of these young heroes can foresee is the growing desperation of the Hrum leaders. It will lead some to break their own laws and sacred pacts and will reveal truths to Kavi, Soraya, and Jiaan about the nature of war, the nature of human beings, and -- most importantly -- the nature of themselves. Hilari Bell builds the action and intrigue to a crescendo in the final installment of this critically acclaimed trilogy.
Forgive our Foolish Ways: An unforgettable saga of the power of friendship
by Margaret ThorntonAfter a series of upheavals, Josie finds friendship in the unlikeliest of places... Margaret Thornton's Forgive Our Foolish Ways is a powerful saga of grief, family and friendship during the stormy days of the Second World War. Perfect for fans of Dilly Court and Annie Murray.'A lovely book to read by the fireside on dark, long nights' - Herald Express Struggling to come to terms with her mother's tragic death, Josie Goodwin is distraught when she hears that her father is to remarry before the year is out. Bossy, buxom Iris Collier, who's had her eye on Samuel Goodwin for quite some time, is to be Josie's stepmother and it's clear from the start they aren't going to get on. A family holiday in Blackpool with her younger brother Bertie and sister Frances fills Josie with joy, but the growing intimacy between Iris and Frances soon dampens her spirits, making her feel isolated and unloved.After the holiday Josie finds that the situation at home doesn't improve. Then the Second World War erupts and a series of events take place that will change her life forever. Moving to Blackpool to escape from the war's painful memories, she gains a deeper understanding of her stepmother's ways and slowly but surely they establish a bond of friendship that is to see them through the ups and downs of the coming years. What readers are saying about Forgive Our Foolish Ways: 'Margaret Thornton is a brilliant storyteller. Her books draw you in, so you feel you know the characters. Hard to put down''Brilliant''Five stars'