{"title":"Frank McLynn","description":"Frank McLynn is a highly regarded historian and the author of more than twenty critically acclaimed biographies, including Marcus Aurelius and Richard \u0026amp; John A graduate of Wadham College, Oxford, and London University, where he obtained his doctorate, he lives and writes in England.","products":[{"product_id":"marcus-aurelius-a-life-paperback","title":"Marcus Aurelius: A Life - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eMarcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) is one of the great figures of antiquity who still speaks to us today, more than two thousand years after his death. His \u003ci\u003eMeditations\u003c\/i\u003e has been compared by John Stuart Mill to the Sermon on the Mount. A guide to how we should live, it remains one of the most widely read books from the classical world. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e But Marcus Aurelius was much more than a philosopher. As emperor he stabilized the empire, issued numerous reform edicts, and defended the borders with success. His life itself represented the fulfillment of Plato's famous dictum that mankind will prosper only when philosophers are rulers and rulers philosophers. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Frank McLynn's \u003ci\u003eMarcus Aurelius\u003c\/i\u003e, based on all available original sources, is the definitive and most vivid biography to date of this monumental historical figure.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51365892554975,"sku":"9780306819162","price":24.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/By8vOi-I8b9780306819162.webp?v=1789073617"},{"product_id":"wagons-west-the-epic-story-of-americas-overland-trails-paperback","title":"Wagons West: The Epic Story of America's Overland Trails - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn what The Washington Post has called \"fascinating,\" Frank McLynn has penned a year-by-year account of the pioneering efforts to conquer and settle the American West. Wagons West is a stirring history of the years from 1840 to 1849--the years between the era of the fur trappers and the beginning of the gold rush. In all the sagas of human migration, few can top the drama of the journey by Midwestern farmers to Oregon and California in those years. Although they used mountain men as guides, they went almost literally into the unknown, braving dangers from hunger, thirst, disease, and drowning. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eUsing original diaries and memoirs, McLynn \"provides intimate, perceptive insights into that time\"(The Baltimore Sun) and underscores the incredible heroism and dangerous folly on the overland trails. His well-informed and authoritative narrative investigates the events leading up to the opening of the trails, the wagons and animals used by the pioneers, the role of women, relations with Native Americans, and much else. The climax arrives in McLynn's expertly re-created tale of the dreadful Donner party, and he closes with Brigham Young and the Mormons beginning communites of their own. Full of high drama, tragedy, and triumph, it brilliantly chronicles one of the principal chapters in the creation of the United States as we know it today. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe Anglo-Americans were the last people to arrive in the West. The British had penetrated the Oregon Territory, the Spanish had occupied Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California, and even the Russians and Chinese had traveled to the Pacific seaboard. But until the 1840s, the West was a mere backwater in the life of the United States. The U.S. interest in the West didn't begin until the 1840s, years after the Lewis and Clark expedition, commissioned by the US President Thomas Jefferson after he purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803. This new territory doubled the size of the United States, and Lewis and Clark were to explore the newly acquired and unfamiliar land. However, exploring the vast area between the Mississippi and the Pacific was largely the work of the \"mountain men,\" who between 1820 and 1840 reconnoitered the routes that would later be recognized as the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon trails. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWhereas in 1841 just thirty-four people had made it overland to California and in 1842 a mere 125 had reached Oregon, in 1844 1,528 people reached the west coast on the Oregon and California trails. Though the 1844 emigrants were very well organized and equipped, they faced problems no previous Pacific-bound emigrants had had to contend with: torrential rain and tremendous flooding. Having scarcely survived the high waters, the originally combined Oregon-bound and California-bound parties decided to go their separate ways at Fort Laramie. The Oregon-bound party then endured many deaths from disease, and largely degenerated into a free-for-all, with individual riders heading as fast as their horses would take them for the Columbia River. Though the first snows were not expected for a month, they came unseasonably early and caused starvation. One group did however get safely over the Blue Mountains. Around the same time, the Stephens-Murphy party reached Sutter's Fort and was subsequently the first party to prove that wagons could be taken all the way to the Pacific Coast in California. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe Donner party unknowingly headed into the most unimaginable disaster. Moving too slowly to avoid the coming snowstorms, the Donner party proceeded without maps, direct trails or guides. After weeks of starvation due to the snow, members of the Donner party began to discuss cannibalism as an option. Those who did not survive the starvation were eaten by some of the survivors. When relief parties finally found the survivors, they learned to their horror that some of the party's members, including infants and children, had been","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51366140248287,"sku":"9780802140630","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/1Lh1zJIFj_9780802140630.webp?v=1789084387"},{"product_id":"villa-and-zapata-a-biography-of-the-mexican-revolution-paperback","title":"Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e'Refreshing ... Frank McLynn has plunged into an important episode in the modern Mexican experience - namely, the social and political revolution that rocked the country for some twenty years, cost two million lives and reshaped its institutions.' The Wall Street Journal\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Mexican Revolution erupted in 1910 to the cry of \"Tierra y Libertad\" - Land and Liberty. In the ten years that followed, bloody clashes between impassioned rebels and unscrupulous autocrats convulsed a nation in search of a new identity. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt was the first massive social revolution of the twentieth century. Even as it visited further economic, cultural, and racial strife upon a country plagued by oppressive officials and crippled by poverty, it offered hope to the populace. And it made the rebel-outlaws Francisco (Pancho) Villa and Emiliano Zapata heroes in their time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eVilla and Zapata\u003c\/i\u003e vividly chronicles the decade of turbulent and violent events. The ruthless Pancho Villa and his army of ex-cowboys in the north and Emiliano Zapata, recruiting his infantry from the sugar plantations in the south, successfully waged a devastating war on two fronts and brought down a string of autocrats in Mexico City. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrank McLynn tells the story of the revolutionaries' chaotic fight for a cause that more towards agrarian reform than towards the amassing of political power. The struggle expertly reveals the inescapable influence of the United States, intertwined with the use of the railway network to transport men and weapons. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis rousing history recounts, too, the downfall of these two revolutionary heroes. Despite their triumph and only meeting, in 1914, in the Mexican capital, they failed to make common cause and fell victim to intrigues more treacherous than their own. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrank McLynn\u003c\/b\u003e is a British author, biographer, historian and journalist. He is noted for critically acclaimed biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte, Robert Louis Stevenson, Carl Jung, Richard Francis Burton and Henry Morton Stanley. He is also the author of \u003ci\u003eFitzroy Maclean\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBipolar\u003c\/i\u003e, a novel about Roald Amundsen, published by Sharpe Books.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for Frank McLynn: \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'Frank McLynn's achievement ... is to give Charles Edward a solidarity and three-dimensional reality that he usually lacks ... His account of the risings themselves is exemplary and he offers the best case yet for the nearness to success of the '45. What is usually seen as the last shiver of an anachronistic and romantic throwback emerges as a genuine alternative to Whiggery and the Act of Settlement.' \u003cb\u003eBrian Morton, TES\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'A broad canvas, dealing not only with sober historical truth but with the magic spell that either seduced or repelled Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, Burns, Scott, Borrow, Buchan, Stevenson and a hundred Irish poets...' \u003cb\u003eDiarmaid O'Muirithe, Irish Independent\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'A readable and fresh study ... thoroughly researched.' \u003cb\u003eEsmond Wright, Contemporary Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'Valuable in covering the wide sweep of Scotland, England, Ireland and the Continent, and bringing together many diverse strands into a coherent whole. Its wide range and taut approach make it very useful.' \u003cb\u003eRennie McOwan, The Tablet\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'Packed with fascinating detail.' \u003cb\u003eDenis Hills, choosing his book of the year in the Spectator\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'Fitzroy Maclean has found his Boswell in Frank McLynn.' \u003cb\u003eTrevor Royle, Scotland on Sunday\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'Most entertaining.' \u003cb\u003eRichard West\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'Important, timely and balanced.' \u003cb\u003eSoldier\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51367984431327,"sku":"9798672617916","price":24.28,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/OH-gJVGfV29798672617916.webp?v=1789117010"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/frank-mclynn.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}