Book picks similar to
Nineteenth-Century Decoration: The Art of the Interior by Charlotte Gere


19th-century
19th-century-non-fiction
wishlist-specific-editions
material-culture

Life and adventures of "Billy" Dixon, of Adobe Walls, Texas panhandle (1914)


Billy Dixon - 1914
    Life and adventures of "Billy" Dixon, of Adobe Walls, Texas panhandle: a narrative in which is described many things relating to the early Southwest, with an account of the fights between Indians and buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls and the desperate engagement at Buffalo Wallow, for which Congress voted the medal of honor to the survivors.

Ghosts and Shadows: A Marine in Vietnam, 1968-1969


Phil Ball - 1998
    At the time, he would have done anything to escape; only upon reflection years later did he realize that the self-confidence instilled in him by his drill instructors had probably saved his life in Vietnam. A few months after boot camp, Private Ball was shipped out to Vietnam, joining F Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines, near Khe Sanh. As a grunt, in the vernacular of the Corps, Ball, like the other youths of F Company, did a difficult and deadly job in such places as the A Shau Valley, Leatherneck Square, the DMZ and other obscure but critical I Corps locales. His--their--fear of death mingled with homesickness. Little did they realize that the horrors of the Vietnam War--horrors that while in-country they often claimed did not even exist--would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

As if it were yesterday: An old fat man remembers his youth as a Marine in Vietnam


Lee Suydam - 2017
    I try to tell what it was like for me and my brother Marines without fanfare or bravado and give the reader a vivid description of my 13 months.

Welcome To Dong Tam (Jayhawk Two One Book 1)


Michael Trout - 2014
    This is the first in a series of true stories about a young helicopter pilot’s tour of duty in Vietnam.

SHARK AMONG THE MINNOWS: BOOK ONE OF THE HUNTER/KILLER SERIES (HUNTER/KILLER SERIES OF THE FIGHTING TOMCATS 1)


M.L. Maki - 2019
    He, and the 128 men on board, depart their home port of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on a six-month deployment as part of the USS Carl Vinson battlegroup. The San Francisco, SSN-711, is the state-of-the-art in submarine technology of the U.S. Navy. The Akula class submarine Kasholot, K-322, is the state-of-the-art submarine of the Russian Navy. These two ships, commanded by very different men, are destined to hunt each other in the Cold War game until a science experiment gone wrong takes them back in time to December 19, 1941, and the beginning of World War II.

The Life of Stuff: A memoir about the mess we leave behind


Susannah Walker - 2018
    She writes with admirable honesty… It is a book I know I shall read again’ Ruth Hogan, author of The Keeper of Lost Things 'This extraordinary, beautiful memoir gripped me from the first page... it moved me profoundly' Clover Stroud, author of The Wild OtherOnly after her mother’s death does Susannah Walker discover how much of a hoarder she had become. Over the following months, she has to sort through a dilapidated house filled to the brim with rubbish and treasures, in search of a woman she'd never really known or understood in life. This is her last chance to piece together her mother’s story and make sense of their troubled relationship. What emerges from the mess of scattered papers, discarded photographs and an extraordinary amount of stuff is the history of a sad and fractured family, haunted by dead children, divorce and alcohol.The Life of Stuff is a deeply personal memoir about mourning and the shoring up of possessions against the losses and griefs of life, which also raises universal questions about what makes us the people we are. What do our possessions say about us? Why do we project such meaning onto them? And what painful circumstances turn someone who loves their home and the stuff it contains into an incurable hoarder who ends their days in squalor?

Bowery Girl


Kim Taylor Blakemore - 2006
    "...inspiring and poignant historical fiction novel that will engage readers that are looking for an insightful, yet entertaining read. " 5/5 stars, Luxury Reader “lends credence to the millions of historical and contemporary girls who dare to dream in the face of extraordinary challenges.” - Starred Review, Kirkus “Gang violence, raucous carousing, sex, accidental pregnancy, and crime–not what most will expect from Victorian-era historical fiction. But that’s exactly what they’ll find in this tightly plotted novel…” – Booklist NEW YORK, 1883: Gamblers and thieves, immigrants and street urchins, Do-Gooders and charity houses, impossible goals and impossible odds. The Bowery is a place where you own nothing but your dreams. And dreams are the only things that come cheap for pickpocket Mollie Flynn and prostitute Annabelle Lee. Pleasure is fleeting - and often stolen. Nights at Lefty Malone's saloon, sneaking into the Thalia Theatre. Then it's back to their airless, windowless tenement room and the ongoing struggle to keep a roof over their heads and bread in their stomachs. The Brooklyn Bridge is nearing completion, and things are changing in New York City. The two women fantasize of starting a new life across the East River. Nothing but a flight of fancy, perhaps, until wealthy Do-Gooder Emmeline DuPre, who has opened the Cherry Street Settlement House, steps into their lives with her books, typewriters, and promises of a way to earn a respectable living. Despite Mollie and Annabelle's fascination with the woman and what she offers, is Emmeline helping or meddling? Is it really possible to be anything other than a Bowery Girl? Mollie and Annabelle will have to decide exactly who they are, and what sort of women they want to be. Originally published by Viking, 2006.

Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain


Matthew Engel - 2009
    Trains are deeply embedded in the national psyche and folklore—yet it is considered uncool to care about them. For Matthew Engel the railway system is the ultimate expression of Britishness. It represents all the nation's ingenuity, incompetence, nostalgia, corruption, humor, capacity for suffering, and even sexual repression. To uncover its mysteries, Engel has traveled the system from Penzance to Thurso, exploring its history and talking to people from politicians to platform staff. Along the way Engel finds the most charmingly bizarre train in Britain, the most beautiful branch line, the rudest railway man, and—after a quest lasting decades—an individual pot of strawberry jam. Eleven Minutes Late is both a polemic and a paean, and it is also very funny.

Gunner Officer on the Western Front: The Story of a Prime Minister's Son at War


Herbert Asquith - 2018
    The author witnessed the mud-soaked agony of the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, and the rapidly moving events of the following year. The book contains one of the most extraordinary accounts of the German spring offensive in 1918, from the point of view of a gunner officer with a grandstand view of the ruthless German advance.The author's father was Prime Minister at the outbreak of the first world war. The author's three brothers also served during the war; his eldest brother died during the Battle of the Somme.

Empire Day (New England Book 1)


James Philip - 2018
     It is the day before Empire Day – 4th July - the day each year when the British Empire marks the brutal crushing of the rebellion dignified by the treachery of the fifty-six delegates to the Continental Congress who were so foolhardy as to sign the infamous Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on that day of infamy in 1776. It is nearly two hundred years since George Washington was killed and his Continental Army was destroyed in the Battle of Long Island and now New England, that most quintessentially loyal and ‘English’ imperial fiefdom – at least in the original, or ‘First Thirteen’ colonies - is about to celebrate its devotion to the Crown and the Old Country, of which it still views, in the main, as the ‘mother country’. Yet all is not roses. Since 1776 in a world of empires the British Empire has grown and prospered until now, it stands alone as the ultimate arbiter of global war and peace. The Royal Navy has enforced the global Pax Britannia for over a century since the World War of the 1860s established a lasting but increasingly tenuous ‘peace’ between the great powers. Nonetheless, while elsewhere the Empire may be creaking at the seams, struggling to come to terms with a growing desire for self-determination; thus far the Pax Britannica has survived – buttressed by the commercial and industrial powerhouse of New England stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific North West - intact for all that barely a year goes by without the outbreak of another small, colonial war somewhere... This said, the British ‘Imperial System’ remains the envy of its friends and enemies alike and nowhere has it been so successful as in North America, where peace and prosperity has ruled in the vast Canadian dominions and the twenty-nine old and recent colonies of the Commonwealth of New England for the best part of two centuries. In Whitehall every British government in living memory has complacently based its ‘American Policy’ on the one immutable, unchanging fact of New England politics; that the First Thirteen colonies will never agree with each other about anything, let alone that the sixteen ‘Johnny-come-lately’ new (that is, post-1776) colonies, protectorates, territories and possessions which comprise half the population and eight-tenths of the land area of New England, should ever have any say in their affairs! New England is a part of England and always will be because, axiomatically, it will never unite in a continental union. Notwithstanding, in the British body politic the myths and legends of that first late eighteenth-century rebellion in the New World still touches a raw nerve in the old country, much as in former epochs memories of Jacobin revolts, Oliver Cromwell and the Civil War still harry old deep-seated scars in the national psyche. Empire Day might not have originally been conceived as a celebration of the saving of the first British Empire and but as time has gone by it has come to symbolise the one, ineluctable truth about the Empire: that New England is the rock upon which all else stands, an empire within an empire that is greater than the sum of all the other parts of the great imperium ruled from London. In past times a troubling question has been whispered in the corridors of power in London: what would happen to the Empire – and the Pax Britannica – if the British hold on New England was ever to be loosened? Generations of British politicians have always known that if the question was ever to be asked again in earnest it has but one answer.

Loving the Hendersons


Synithia Williams - 2016
    You'll fall in love, too!Love's Replay: David Henderson is so desperate to stop his father from selling their family's auto dealership, he'll even marry to prove he's serious about the future. Enter ex-lover Sandra Miller, who is back in town to help her successful business career. Too bad those prospects hang on partnering with David, the man who once crushed her heart. Will the mistrust and jealousy that tore them apart before prevent a replay of their rekindled love?Just My Type: Janiyah Henderson enjoys her stress-free post-college life, but when her dad insists she can't handle a "real job," she's determined to prove him wrong. Her high-spirited ways clash with the conservative instincts of her new boss, accountant Fredrick Jenkins, yet attraction brews between them. When Fredrick shows Janiyah the man behind the numbers, she realizes she could be just the type of woman he needs.Making It Real: After five years in prison, Kareem Henderson is on the right track as a barber, with a goal to open a high-end salon. But he needs society connections to make his dream a reality. Patrice "Neecie" Baldwin, needs a shield to return home, so she offers Kareem a deal: Pretend to be her fiance, and she'll introduce him to her well-healed relatives. But as they grow closer, this fake relationship might become something very real.From One Night to Forever: When trucker Aaron Henderson rolls into Reliant, Tennessee, for business, a singing beauty at a bar stirs feelings he's long forgotten. Then his one-night stand turns out to be his new partner's baby sister. When Kacey Randal learns that Aaron's working with her brother and has a list of conquests as high as his big rig's mileage, she's ready to pretend their night together never happened. But the fire burns hot between these two--can Kacey tame Aaron's roaming ways to go from one night to forever?Sensuality Level: Sensual

B-29 Superfortress (Annotated): The Plane that Won the War


Gene Gurney - 2015
    Author Gene Gurney takes the reader from the superplane’s inception, test flights and production to its combat deployments and its ultimate purpose of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Unexpected Love For The Reclusive Rancher: A Clean Western Historical Romance Book


Ember Pierce - 2021
    

Strange Are The Ways


Teresa Crane - 1993
    Petersburg, Russia: The Shalakov family are moving from Moscow to start new lives. A family of musicians and violin makers in the traumatic early years of the 20th century, they’re faced with war and revolution, gruelling hardship and the breakdown of relationships and values caused by these most harrowing of events.A tale of unlikely loves and of unforgiving hatreds. Of bravery and cowardice, of innocence betrayed and of courage that will outface the harshest of adversity and the ever-present threat and shadow of death. A compelling family saga of the valour of the human spirit and of the magic of music that can do so much to sustain and support it. Perfect for fans of Josephine Cox, Lily Graham and Natasha Lester.

Flotilla Attack


Duncan Harding - 2017
    The old sailors, who could remember her past, said that she was jinxed and ought never sail again. But in the last days of 1940, as the phoney war drew to an end, Britain needed every ship she could lay her hands on, to challenge the might of Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. So it was that Lieutenant-Commander John Lamb found himself commanding the old destroyer Rose, with a crew of misfits and troublemakers, and set sail across the dark and icy seas in a desperate race to prevent the German invasion of Norway.... Duncan Harding is a pseudonym for Charles Whiting (1926-2007), who also wrote as Leo Kessler and John Kerrigan. Charles Whiting volunteered for the Army aged 16 in 1943, where he saw active service in Belgium, Holland and Germany with the 52nd Reconnaissance Regiment. He has over 350 books to his credit, encompassing military history, espionage, biography and action fiction and holds the Sir George Dowty Prize for Literature.