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开 本: 32开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780307386267
At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the
night sky over the northern hemisphere. From the Philippines to the
Arctic, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning of
doom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrims
prepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, the
atmosphere remained charged with fear and expectation. Men and
women readied themselves for war, pestilence, or divine
retribution. Against this background, and amid deep economic
depression, the Pilgrims conceived their enterprise of exile.
Within a decade, despite crisis and catastrophe, they built a
thriving settlement at New Plymouth, based on beaver fur, corn, and
cattle. In doing so, they laid the foundations for Massachusetts,
New England, and a new nation. Using a wealth of new evidence from
landscape, archaeology, and hundreds of overlooked or neglected
documents, Nick Bunker gives a vivid and strikingly original
account of the Mayflower project and the first decade of the
Plymouth Colony. From mercantile London and the rural England of
Queen Elizabeth I and King James I to the mountains and rivers of
Maine, he weaves a rich narrative that combines religion, politics,
money, science, and the sea.
The Pilgrims were entrepreneurs as well as evangelicals,
political radicals as well as Christian idealists. Making Haste
from Babylon tells their story in unrivaled depth, from their roots
in religious conflict and village strife at home to their final
creation of a permanent foothold in America.
“One opens this book with a weary sense of resignation. More
hagiography about national origins? Another group of founders? The
Pilgrims? The Mayflower? The Compact? The first Thanksgiving? A
‘new history’? Please! Enough already. And yet . . . it’s not like
that, not at all. To the contrary, Nick Bunker offers a remarkably
fresh take on (it’s true) an old and well-worn story. . . . The
evidence . . . adds up to a picture so full and vivid as to
constitute a virtual ground-level tour of an otherwise lost world.”
—The Washington Post
“A meticulous exploration of the lives of the Pilgrims before
they even set sail. . . . It’s a comprehensive work of genius and a
delight to read.” —GalleyCat.com
“A wonderfully engaging study. . . . There is so much here that
is fresh and invigorating that Making Haste from Babylon will seem
to some lovers of early American history a real page-turner with
new readings and perceptive takes in each chapter. Bunker has
written that rarest of books—a scholarly history with all the
narrative punch of a novel.” —The Providence Journa
“Bunker . . . is simply a marvelous writer with a nose for the
fascinating anecdote. . . . There’s some intriguing fact or story
on every page . . . so much of Making Haste from Babylon [is] rich
in the thrill of brushing up against the past and its fathomless
mysteries.” —Salon.com
“A bold work of revisionism.” —Harper’s Magazine
“Making Haste from Babylon is essential reading for those who
think they know the story of the Pilgrims. . . . All this and more
Bunker relates with enviable concision and verve.” —BBC History
Magazine
“Prodigious . . . [Bunker’s] vivid style and bold analysis infuse
this book with colour and pace, and the result is an indispensable
contribution to understanding how it all began.” —Literary
Review
”This superb book secures for the Pilgrims their iconic perch
among the earliest founders of colonial America. Bunker…has
succeeded in writing a major history, unprecedented in its sweep,
of the Plymouth Colony. . . . Never before has such a comprehensive
and thoroughly researched study of the subject appeared. . . . The
results are stunning. Certain to be the dominating work on the
Pilgrims for decades.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Nick Bunker has done the seemingly impossible: he has shed new
light on the oldest of stories, the epic of the Pilgrims’
experience in the Old and New Worlds. With graceful writing
and diligent scholarship, he has given us an engaging and original
book.” —Jon Meacham
“I have rarely read a book which combines such a breadth of
canvas…with such penetrating and detailed research.” —Patrick
Collinson, Professor of Modern History, Cambridge University
(emeritus)
“In this beautifully written and imagined book, impeccably
researched, and full of so many fresh insights and
discoveries, Nick Bunker has given us the most grounded and
convincing portrait yet achieved of what drove the Pilgrim
Fathers to seek their faith and fortune in the New World. . . .
Combining intensive archive research with a time traveler’s
eye he conjures a wonderfully evocative sense of
place. . . . It is a fabulous tale of our ancestors, but also the
true founding moment of America.” —Michael Wood, British historian,
documentary filmmaker, and broadcaster
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