Hardcover. Boston, Faber and Faber, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, pages. "I write of peoples and of a struggle." So begins A New World, an ambitious and extraordinary book that challenges conventional historical narrative by presenting episodes in North America's history through the eyes and voices of the Europeans who established the first colonial outposts here. Beginning with the swaggering John Smith at Jamestown and ending with the beleaguered Montcalm at Quebec, Arthur Quinn allows towering historical figures to emerge from an often beautiful, sometimes forbidding early American landscape and speak. An elderly William Bradford looks back with growing despair at the early promise of the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth. Governor John Winthrop tries to administer a dose of practicality to the Puritans of Massachusetts. Jesuit missionaries bring Christianity and disaster to the Huron Confederacy. A blustering Peter Stuyvesant watches Manhattan slip from Dutch grasp. William Penn's Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania goes increasingly awry. And, finally, the British and the French fight history's first world war for supremacy in the New World. Telling each story using the literary conventions of the day, Quinn casts North America's colonial beginnings as a multicultural epic, gripping the reader throughout with his uncanny eye and storytelling skill. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 358 pages. A riveting historical mystery of Colonial America. In April, 1586, Queen Elizabeth I acquired a new and exotic title. A tribe of Native Americans, "savages," had made her their weroanza-a word that meant "big chief." The news was received with great joy, both by the Queen and by her favorite, Sir Walter Ralegh. His first American expedition had brought back a captive, Manteo, whose tattoed face and otter-skin cloak had caused a sensation in Elizabethan London. In 1857, Manteo was returned to his homeland as Lord and Governor, along with more than 100 English men, women and children.In 1590, a supply ship arrived at the colony to discover that the settlers had vanished. For almost twenty years the fate of Ralegh's colonists was to remain a mystery. When a new wave of settlers sailed to America to found Jamestown, their efforts to locate the lost colony were frustrated by the mighty chieftain, Powhatan, father of Pocahontas, who vowed to drive the English out of America. Only when it was too late did the settlers discover the incredible news that Ralegh's colonists had survived in the forests for almost two decades before being slaughtered in cold blood by Powhatan's henchmen. Clean copy.
