Capital, as Marx once wrote, comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” He might well have been describing the long, grim history of rubber. From the early stages of primitive accumulation to the heights of the industrial revolution and beyond, rubber is one of a handful of commodities that has played a crucial role in shaping the modern world, and yet, as John Tully shows in this remarkable book, laboring people around the globe...
Ireland, early 1800s. The Napoleonic Wars have ended, leaving an already disjointed country in peril. Maurice O'Dwyer, a young Irishman, considers the lifeless body of an English tithe-collector slain under a rain-filled sky. From that moment it seems his fate is sealed: he and his young simpleton brother, Padraig, are exiled to Australia, <i>An Astráil</i>, to the convict-filled island of Van Diemen's Land – leaving behind his love, his land, and his liberty. However, in...
Tully's great-great uncle Michael was hanged for murder more than a century ago. According to family lore, he was attacked in a pub – accused by his attacker because as an Irish immigrant he was taking work from locals. At a time when anti-Irish prejudice was rampant during an economic depression, he never stood a chance of justice.<br /> <br />The bare bones of the story are more or less 'true' but have been fleshed out using the author's imagination....
Set in wintry Tasmania in the early 1990s, with flashbacks to post-war Hobart and Europe during World War II, this story deals with dark secrets, crime and Nazi plots, interwoven with familiar domestic tensions of family life and marriage. Tully creates a fictional world strongly embedded in authentic details of real locations and well-conceived characters.<br /> <br />The earthy, passionate main protagonist, Jack Martin, is richly drawn: <i>'A typical copper – detective...
Long before the smokestacks and factories of industrial Akron rose from Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley, the region was a place of tense confrontation. Beginning in the early 19th-century, white settlers began pushing in from the east, lured by the promise of cheap (or free) land. They inevitably came into conflict with the current inhabitants, American Indians who had thrived in the valley for generations or had already been displaced by settlement along the eastern seaboard. Here, on what was...
