Killarney National Park: The oakwoods of Killarney

Book Description

“A rope rises up into the air. A boy climbs up the rope and when the boy gets to the top he vanishes into thin air,” explains Peter Lamont, winner of the Jeremy Dalziel prize in British History, and author of The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, about a tall tale that found its way into legend. The rope trick is one of the most successful hoaxes of all time, created by an amateur magician and printed in the Chicago Tribune in 1890. Despite a later admission that the story was false, it continued to spread in newspapers and journals throughout the world. Some claimed to have seen the trick performed on trips to India. Others added their own spin to the tale. Using the original legend as a starting point, Lamont, who has performed as a magician and psychic, explores how easily people will believe stories that are fed to them as truth despite all logical senses and their outright impossibility.

Customer Reviews:

The Indian rope trick really does exist.......2007-08-19

Guys

I have not read this book yet, but I can't resist myself from commenting on this topic.

I don't know what kind of research the author has done and arrived at the conclusion that the Indian rope trick was a complete HOAX.

The fact is that the Indian Rope Trick does really exist. It's just that very few magicians can do it. The classic Indian rope trick (boy vanishing in thin air and then the master cutting him in to pieces) may be a myth, but the Indian rope trick is very much performed even today.

[...].

There is an excellent demonstration of the trick in BBC's program supernatural science - Secrets of Levitation where Nishamuddin, a magician from India, who has revived this trick, performs the trick for BBC.

There is a professor and a magician in Kerla (southern India) who can also perform this trick.

So I don't know what's all this fuss about?

Magic is all "Illusion.".......2005-04-10

According to this magician who looked for what wasn't there, "history is not the past, only the historian's interpretation of a very small part of it." Those who write history do not know all the facts, do not deem some of them important or entertaining enough to sell papers, or books. Bare facts are of little use without historical interpretations. He dontinues, "Two historians reading the same text choose different facts and write different stories, nothing alike" Similar to these reviews, I would imagine.

Even in newspapers, "facts" depend on what editors have decided are important and the tales by the journalist (their personal opinions) are never identical. History will always be a matter of opinion, but one based on evidence, so-called historical facts.

In the 17th century, Indian and Persian magicians were called jugglers. Mostly the charmed snakes, but never anything to compare with America's David Copperfield. Magic was a world of enchantment, like Merlin's in Camelot, filled with illusion. The age of technology in late 17th and 18th centuries brought Enlightenment,

There is no documentation of the rope trick as originating from India; a shaman from Siberia claimed to have climbed to the sky "by the use of a rope." But it was a story about a trick with a rope in India which captured the popular imagination and became the world's most famous hoax,

Like 'The War of the Worlds' radio fraud, this is believed to have been a false newspaper article written in 1890 in America; the author admitted it was untrue and had even written that there was no factual verification. But the notion and notoriety prompted people to claim that they had seen it with their own eyes. It is ordinary folks who bring a legend to life.

Many photos throughout this book shows how the thing proliferated and could have happened. The best in my opinion is the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, contemplating a coiled rope with perhaps five feet up in the air. As we all know, Hollywood was the purveyor of props and rumors. It was a 'charade.'

The Trick That Never Was That Became a Real Trick.......2005-03-03

You wouldn't have thought that a magic trick that never was is the best known magical trick of all time.

Peter Lamont uses this trick as the foundation of a search into magic tricks of all kinds, but especially tricks from India. His search has taken him back into history and finally a trip to India doing research.

Extensively researched and referenced this is a very interesting trip into the explanation of magic. When I first picked it up, because of the title, I expected to put it down again quickly. Instead I found the writing style and the content to be fascinating and didn't put it down.

Every so often I get some kind of story in an e-mail describing something that just makes so much sense that it had to have happened. It's nice to know that such urban legends didn't just start with the Internet, but a long time ago.

The Indian Rope Trick - a totally made up story - in Chicago - nothing to do with India at all. Then magicians had to come up with a way to do it. Strange world.

An Illusory Illusion.......2005-02-11

Perhaps you have seen a magician pull a rabbit out of a demonstrably empty hat. You may have seen the classic magical trick of sawing a woman in half. And perhaps you have seen the Indian rope trick: the conjurer, standing in an open field, throws one end of a rope into the air, where defying gravity, it stays, and a boy comes to climb up the rope, reaches the top, and disappears. No, you have not seen that one, perhaps, but it is as famous as the others and has caused a century of wonder, perhaps not from audiences but from those who have tried to see the illusion and tried to learn how it was done. In _The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History_ (Thunder's Mouth Press), Peter Lamont, a magician and an academic researcher on the performance of magic, has written a hugely entertaining book about the most legendary and exotic of magic tricks. "A legend is very much like an illusion," he writes, "more interesting and invariably more attractive than reality." We need legends, and this one is so colorful and mysterious, Lamont's careful probing and deflating make it even more attractive.

The amazing truth is that there never was any Indian rope trick, and it has almost nothing to do with India. It was the invention of a loyal American, a journalist who later went on to become the head of the US Secret Service. John Elbert Wilkie was a reporter for the _Chicago Tribune_, and in 1890 he published an anonymous article describing the rope trick as seen in India, and how it was done. He made it all up. There were those who spoke up, certain that people were seeing the rope trick before 1890, but there are no accounts of the trick before that time. A few weeks later, the _Tribune_ published a confession that the story was a hoax, but newspapers across America and Europe were spreading the story, while the retraction got nowhere. As Lamont writes, "A legend does not survive on accuracy." The community of magicians, and those fascinated by their effects, became split between those who were convinced that the rope trick was a real illusion and those who thought it an illusory illusion. The efforts of those who believed the trick to be real have been extensive. A photograph was finally produced of the trick in 1919, but it turned out to be the far more prosaic trick of a boy balancing on a pole. People had seen the trick in India, but they turned out to be people who were reported as seeing it by other people, the familiar "friend of a friend" basis of countless urban legends. There were those who claim to have seen the trick themselves. Many of them took decades to speak up and say that they had actually seen the trick performed, but a psychologist has found that the memories get elaborated, with fancier versions being recalled the more distant the memory is.

One particular elaboration has outdone Wilkie's conception, and has had its own life, supporters, and detractors. This is the version in which the boy climbs the rope and the magician climbs up after him, only to chop the boy up and throw his separated pieces down, whereupon they are magically reunited and the boy brought back to life. As in the original, there are those who claim to know just how this trick is done, but of course it is never done. Throughout this book is documented the human eagerness to believe; skeptics may assure the public with factual assertions about how the trick never existed, but as Lamont writes, the people who keep Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster going are the same types that will keep the Indian rope trick in existence, even though it never had an existence to begin with. With his book, full of arcane facts and documentation presented by a humorous and entertaining guide, Lamont knows that he is only going to strengthen the legend. In fact, in a jaunty epilogue, he tells us he has, indeed, seen the trick himself, and any reader will agree, he tells a good story.

Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

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Leftist fantasy revisited
A Promissory Note That Will Likely Never Be Made Good
The Most Frightening Question that Can't be Asked
Nietzsche Has Hijacked Your Brain
Trouble w/ Nietzsche

Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Post-Contemporary Interventions)
Geoff Waite
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0822317192

Book Description

Appearing between two historical touchstonesâthe alleged end of communism and the 100th anniversary of Nietzsche’s deathâthis book offers a provocative hypothesis about the philosopher’s afterlife and the fate of leftist thought and culture. At issue is the relation of the dead Nietzsche (corpse) and his written work (corpus) to subsequent living Nietzscheanism across the political spectrum, but primarily among a leftist corps that has been programmed and manipulated by concealed dimensions of the philosopher’s thought. If anyone is responsible for what Geoff Waite maintains is the illusory death of communism, it is Nietzsche, the man and concept.
Waite advances his argument by bringing Marxistâespecially Gramscian and Althusserianâtheories to bear on the concept of Nietzsche/anism. But he also goes beyond ideological convictions to explore the vast Nietzschean influence that proliferates throughout the marketplace of contemporary philosophy, political and literary theory, and cultural and technocultural criticism. In light of a philological reconstruction of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished texts, Nietzsche’s Corps/e shuttles between philosophy and everyday popular culture and shows them to be equally significant in their having been influenced by Nietzscheâin however distorted a form and in a way that compromises all of our best interests.
Controversial in its âdecelebrationâ of Nietzsche, this remarkable study asks whether the postcontemporary age already upon us will continue to be dominated and oriented by the haunting spectre of Nietzsche’s corps/e. Philosophers, intellectual historians, literary theorists, and those interested in western Marxism, popular culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the intersection of French and German thought will find this book both appealing and challenging.

Customer Reviews:

Leftist fantasy revisited.......2007-04-16

I wrote the following review, in haste, in 2000, but I'm going to resist the temptation to revise it: I'll add something at the bottom instead.

"I bought this book with the honest wish to encounter a real criticism of Nietzsche's thought. I believe it is in the interest of us all, and especially of us Americans, for Socialism to take on this Herculean critic of itself and of the 'herd' in general. What I found was an encounter with a fantasy version of Nietzsche. This book is so wrong headed, from the perspective of someone who has real knowledge of Nietzsche's thought, that it produces wry smiles that decline into outright laughter at the obvious bloopers. Finally I am left with embarrassment at the level of scholarship coming from Cornell, and even praised on the back cover by professors from Princeton and Yale. The book is admirably footnoted but most of the sources are secondary to Nietzsche's writings and the many references to Nietzsche's ideas are rarely footnoted (and indeed they couldn't possibly be because they are often obviously wrong.) It is written in the obscure jargon that Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger, et al have made de rigueur in American graduate schools and is therefore difficult to understand without contorting oneself into a postmodern pretzel. I think, to end on a sort of positive note, it would make good fodder for a critique of the whole paranoid left, a left that was at the heart of the murder of socialism both from within and from without. So in a sort of negative move to optimism, and to steal a small amount of voltage and noise from the thunder and lightening of the(hopefully spurious) Left, go ahead and buy this book and use it as an object lesson on how not to write, how not to criticise Marx, Lenin, Lennon, Groucho, Nietzsche, or even your own mother let alone the Grand Dragon that this book tries to slay. "Nietzsche's position," this book proclaims fatuously, "is the only one outside of communism." What else can I say?"

"Nietzsche's Corps/e" is not a study of Nietzsche's thought but of the Nietzsche effluvia that has reached American shores from the rotting corpses of Bataille, Baudrillard, Foucault, Deleuze, and other Frenchmen, and above all, from the corpse of Jacques Derrida.

The French, of course, are capable of reading Nietzsche with clarity and insight. (Nietzsche thought of France as the center of Western Civilization and counted on finding his best readers there.) In fact, Michel Haar, a Frenchman, has written an excellent analysis of Nietzsche's philosophical thought called "Nietzsche and Metaphysics" which I recommend as a counter balance to the above mentioned French pop-star-philosopher, byzantine rants and sometimes pornography that Waite and his heroes pummel us with. You can find it on Amazon Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

For a balanced view of Nietzsche's historical setting and political views, I recommend two books. The first, by a historian, is Peter Bergmann's Nietzsche, "the Last Antipolitical German"

The second examines Nietzsche's political views and is written by a political scientist, Leslie Paul Thiele. It is called Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism

A Promissory Note That Will Likely Never Be Made Good.......2006-07-24

This book is hands down the most intelligent left-wing book on Nietzsche in existence! Waite correctly dismisses the playful postmodern Nietzsche of dance and mask worshipped by soi-disant intellectuals and thus gets far closer to the heart of Nietzsche's purpose than they ever do. Waite is unafraid to ask the question who should rule. Also, unlike virtually all 'leftish' Nietzschean commentators Waite is very familiar with the esoteric nature of Nietzsche's writings. He has married the politico-philosophical esoteric readings of Leo Strauss with the revolutionary ideals of Marxism and has given us the only left reading of Nietzsche that is worth reading twice. It now seems, ten long years after the publication of this book, that this marriage between Marxism and esotericism is going to produce no heirs. Which is a pity; I would very much like to have seen a comparison of the dialectical method and the esoteric method that is not simply a hatchet job. By that I mean I would very much like to have seen a study that compares esoteric and dialectical thought written by someone who is adept -and recognized as such by all practitioners- in both these extraordinary philosophical methods. ...But it now seems likely that this will never be. Why?

I would begin to answer that question by noting how remarkable it is that the none of the earlier reviews of this extraordinary book even mentioned Leo Strauss. But, as anyone who has read this book knows, the Straussian understanding of philosophical texts is crucial to Waite's argument. So why this silence among reviewers? One of the problems, if not the main problem, is that in a propaganda war one is at pains to either downplay or ignore the acute contributions to thought of ones enemies. The danger, intelligently alluded to in an earlier review, is that rather than making 'Nietzscheanism' weaker, all Waite has done, by making Nietzsche seem so intelligent and interesting, is make him stronger. In a similar manner and for similar reasons, much of the left would rather ignore Strauss, or excoriate him, rather than present him in an intelligent manner.

Now, these are tactical issues that I do not pretend to be competent to judge, but I will point out that all tactical concerns are temporary and local. If the Marxist-esotericism that Waite here pioneers is a genuine contribution to thought (i.e., if both the esoteric reading of texts à la Leo Strauss and Marxist dialectic are indeed genuine contributions) then it would be sheer madness to ignore either Waite or Strauss. It was Merleau-Ponty, I believe, who once observed quite correctly, in the heat of a similar ideological confrontation, that 'we must not leave our enemies any good ideas'. If Merleau-Ponty is correct in this, that it is always a long-term strategic mistake, for what is at bottom momentary tactical considerations, to ignore genuinely intelligent contributions of enemies then Waite's contribution has been foolishly ignored by the left. But if you believe that long-term strategy is trumped by tactical concerns than Waite's book, regardless of the accuracy of his esoteric reading of Nietzsche, must be ignored.

For myself, a mere observer of this conflict, I continue to hope for a confrontation and/or dialogue between the two greatest 'schools' of political philosophy - the dialectical and the esoteric - that is rigorous, critical and informed. ...But who ever really gets what they want?

The Most Frightening Question that Can't be Asked.......2005-04-09

Waite sets us up for a full explication/penetration of the most destructive Nietzsche virus yet imagined. It should be asked, however, whether he is truly trying to destroy/discredit Nietzsche/anism or create/make stronger the very virus he discovers/invents. This question may not be asked, that of the author's intention, as it pertains to Nietzsche or to Waite. Waite makes writing/reading into a psychotic activity. More frightening is that even my own attempt to discredit Waite's reading only makes stronger, or increases the power of it.

Nietzsche Has Hijacked Your Brain.......2003-09-14

Where is Nietzsche today? He is hiding in your brain and in the cyberspace jungle, issuing commands to his faithful corps via his corpse become corpus become everyday life.

Waite's thesis is that Nietzsche's esoteric and indeed exoteric agenda is the extermination of the weak and the enslavement of the masses with the object of giving the elite male genius the time and the wealth to pursue his masturbational projects of self-creation and self-glorification. Decent people, communist or not, should (should you say?) have nothing to do with this murderous project. Leftists should find someone else to quote.

The most closely held premise of Nietzsche was (is) that some people are better than others and that society should be ordered accordingly. Now I don't see how anything, including superior power, could make someone objectively, metaphysically better than anyone else. But Nietzsche would unflinchingly reject the terms of my characterization. Or possibly just chase us angrily with his umbrella.

Unless you happen to be one of Nietzsche's Supermen (and you had really be sure that you actually are a Superman and not someone who has been unwittingly duped in to thinking that he is the Higher Man) then you ally yourself with Nietzsche at your own peril.

Now all of this may be hyperbole, but given what is at stake, hyperbole may be in order.

Trouble w/ Nietzsche.......2001-11-19

Waite's book illustrates a series of "problems" with Nietzsche and Nietzschean-ism: 1/ The Big Lie; 2/ The Double Code; 3/ The Master/Slave Thing; 4/ The So-Called Secret Agenda; 5/ The Will to Power; 6/ The Hellenic Thing; and 7/ The Proto-Postmodernism. It avoids 8/ The Migraines and the Pain, a subject belaboured by Pierre Klossowski in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969).

An initial reading of both Geoffrey Waite's masterful tirade against the Nietzscheans, Nietzsche's Corps/e, and Pierre Klossowski's (in)famous Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle suggests damning evidence of a misappropriation of Nietzsche (most tellingly by poststructuralists and the Left). Waite points to a very famous symposium, held in July 1972 at Cerisy-la-Salle (Normandy) and attended by the illuminati of the French structuralist-poststructuralist camp (Derrida, Nancy, Klossowski et alia), as the time and place that Klossowski first 'broadcast' his idea of the "secret" Nietzsche.

Waite's book is a demolition of this edifice constructed by the French illuminati and a denunciation of Nietzsche Himself by way of a high-rhetorical romp through the drug-like nature of Nietzsche's thought: "Nietzsche is a type of H/Meth, arguably the major type of post/narcotic 'quiver between history and ontology'." Waite is quoting Avital Fonell's "Our Narcotic Modernity" from Rethinking Technologies (1993) and setting the stage for his investigation of how Nietzsche's writings insinuate themselves into consciousness without necessarily being processed by the rational vectors of the brain. Waite's premise is that Nietzsche indeed, pace Klossowski, encoded a subliminal message into his work. The Genealogy of Morals (1887) and The Gay Science (1882) - plus Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85) - are the principle examples of this narcotic prose style.

Perhaps the most rewarding portion of Waite's book is the section "Nietzsche's Esoteric Semiotics", wherein he takes on Klossowski's reading (and therefore the structuralist-poststructuralist camp en masse) and goes about the ravishing analysis of the so-called secret agenda. Nietzsche, it would seem, is the true avatar of postmodernism (nihilism and/plus relativism) and purposely buried his message in the paradoxical, ironic posturing of his works. His message is, in Waite's reading, proto-deconstructivist and attempts to condition all possible futures. Nietzsche has become second nature to our collective postcultural selves - essentially self-deconstructing selves - underwriting almost every discourse that pretends to demolish power in the name of heterogeneity. Perhaps Waite is at his best when he is positing what has been lost; i.e., a possible communism and/or a possible utopian project called enlightenment. Nietzsche, in other words, demolished all pretexts that might underwrite such an agenda.

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Absolutely Beautiful!!

Indeed Spectacular

Spectacular India (Spectacular Series)
Inc. Hugh Lauter Levin Associates
Manufacturer: Universe
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Living Faith: Windows into the Sacred Life of India

India India

The Ganges

ASIN: 0883638495
Release Date: 2001-01-09

Book Description

When you think of India, do you think first of ancient architectural treasures such as the Taj Mahal, grandiose Buddhist temples, royal palaces, and the modern buildings of Le Corbusier? Do you think of monsoon-swept seacoasts and tiger-infested jungles, or snow-capped Himalayas and camel rides across sun-scorched deserts? Do you think of backwater fishing villages and tea-farming estates, or the modernized look of cities such as Bombay, Delhi, and Calcutta?

A century ago, Mark Twain described India as "the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genies and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods." Since that time, India has grown and changed, has gained all the advantages of modernization and technological awareness, and yet has not lost the magical qualities that have always charmed visitors. To this day, India is nothing if not diverse. That diversity--the variety of settings, and the spirit of accommodation in which so many distinct cultures live side by side--makes India's national identity as unique and fascinating as any on Earth.

Spectacular India presents an engrossing photographic tour of this extraordinary land, with an oversized landscape format the size of a 19" television, and thirty-six pages of foldouts opening to nearly four feet. The glorious full-color photographs are taken by some of India's finest photographers, and each chapter is written by a prominent Indian expert in the given subject.

Customer Reviews:

Absolutely Beautiful!!.......2003-09-28

Well, this is a beautiful book about absolutely "SPECTACULAR INDIA." The book is a compilation of engrossong photographs of majestic architectural and natural treasures of India. India potrays immense beauty (cut the third-world country crap out). Where the ancient survives with the modern, this country if not more, is as unique and fascinating as any on Earth.

Indeed Spectacular.......2002-09-17

I have personally reviewed this book. Most journalists and photographers have exhibited shortsightedness by never being able to see beyond India's status as a third-world country. This has reinforced India's reputation in the Western world more in terms of what it was under British rule rather than the period before or after it. Of course this is not an accurate portrayal of the rich culture, heritage and diversity spanning thousands of years; and modernity of rapidly changing contemporary India.

Book Description

This digital document is an article from African Review of Business and Technology, published by Thomson Gale on August 1, 2006. The length of the article is 1517 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Spectacular surge in Indo-African trade: India's economic miracle could soon be rivalling that of China and Africa is learning a lot from one of its oldest trading partners. The latest figures on imports from this source are spectacular, as our special correspondent reports.(India)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication: African Review of Business and Technology (Magazine/Journal)
Date: August 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 42 Issue: 7 Page: 27(3)

Distributed by Thomson Gale

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Spectacular India
Kuldip Nayer
Manufacturer: BEAUX ARTS EDITIONS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000WS8GVA

Book Description

This is the first full-length biography of Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904), Anglo-Irish reformer, feminist and anti-vivisectionist. Building on original research, Cobbe's autobiography and the work of later historians, Lori Williamson analyzes Cobbe's ideological outlook as well as her life.

A workhouse visitor, Cobbe campaigned strenuously for the rights of women, of the poor and of animals and was the first to draw up a petition to control cruelty to animals. Through Cobbe's life and work, Power and Protest explores the issues of protest, reform, hierarchy, power and gender, the relationship between men and women, and between humans and animals and includes important work on pressure-group dynamics.

Given its wide-ranging scope, its depiction of nineteenth-century British society and culture, and its exploration of the symbiotic relationships between ideology and the dynamics of protest, Power and Protest will interest students of history, social policy, and gender. Its emphasis on anti-vivisection activity provides a powerful basis for understanding power relations and the historical concept of rights.

Book Description

Acclaim for Carolly Erickson

"Carolly Erickson is one of the most accomplished and successful historical biographers writing in English."
-The Times Literary Supplement

The First Elizabeth

"Even more readable and absorbing than the justly praised works of Tuchman and Fraser. A vivid and eminently readable portrait of history's favorite Tudor."
-The New York Times Book Review

"A masterpiece of narrative, a story so absorbing it is as hard to put down as a fine novel."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review

Alexandra

"Gifted . . . breathless . . . heartbreaking . . . Erickson excels."
-Chicago Tribune

Josephine

"An intimate, richly detailed, and candid portrait . . . [Erickson's] scholarly insights combine superbly with a mastery of period manners more often found in the best historical fiction."
-Kirkus Reviews

Mistress Anne

"Carolly Erickson is a most admirable biographer, and this book is highly enjoyable as well as being reliable and acute; indeed, it is popular historical biography at its best."
—The Times (London)

Customer Reviews:

A good piece of niche history.......2007-04-02

This short book retelling the legendary tale of the Girl from Botany Bay--actually Sydney Cove--who was sentenced to penal camp labor in Australia for highway robbery in England in the late 1700s is an entertaining read.

Pieced largely from a few contemporary mentions of Mary Broad in newspapers, journals, and personal memoirs of people who were in the journey with her, Ms. Erickson has put together a short, well researched book.

Though less than 200 pages, the book could have probably been shorter. Since there is so little in the public record about Mary Broad, who was illiterate herself and hence couldn't write down her own story, Ms. Erickson has to spend a great deal of time on conjecture and educated guesses about what may have been going through Mary's mind at a particular point in time. This distraction aside, the book is still worth the short time it would take to read.

Ever wanted a reason to not become a criminal?.......2006-06-03

Terrifying story of the dangers of the sea and the horrors of life on prison ships.

Thank heavens I have never committed any of the crimes (or at least been caught) that would have doomed me to the punishment of being on a ship bound for Botany Bay.

Mary Broad's story of "Crime and Punishment" is a vivid description of 18th century survival under the harshest conditions.

Sealed into a filthy, animalistic hold of a ship and bound for halfway around the world to be imprisioned on the primative Botany Bay, Mary's life goes from bad to worse prompting a plan to escape via a small boat.

With her husband and friends, Mary sets off to get anywhere but Botany Bay. Battered by weather that would have challenged the largest of ships, the little group of escaped convicts suffer hunger and thirst, lose sight of the coast, and find themselves in the open sea.

Finally they drag into the harbor of Kupang where they are accepted and given the warmest of welcomes. Finally, for the first time in her life, Mary experiences pleasures of life that had always been out of her reach. But this dream-life comes to an end when the residents of Kupang realize that their new friends are escaped prisoners.

Mary is turned over to the British and returned to England. Standing trial once again she is to be remanded to Newgate Prison -- it was new then -- but public sentiment moves the courts to determine that Mary has been punished enough and she is released.

The rest of her life is spent quietly and she passes into history without any more notice. The only reason we know her story or even have any interest in the story of Mary Brand is because she was "The Girl from Botany Bay".

Not bad at all.......2005-11-20

Generally I don't enjoy non fiction quite as much as plain old fiction books, but this was an exception.

The story of Mary Broad is quite touching. Arrested for highway robbery and sentenced to hang, she was one of the first waves of convicts to be sailed halfway across the world to England's newest penal colony of Australia. Once there she made a daring escape with her husband, two small children and seven other men. They stole a small dingy and sailed all the way around Australia and then to Indonesia, where they were recaptured and taken back to England for trial. One in England, Mary, whose small children and husband had died since escaping, became a darling of the media and was pardoned.

This is an incredible story, and it's written almost in a novel like fashion, making it accessible to all readers. I look forward to reading more of the author's works.

If you enjoyed this book try reading Morgan's Run by Colleen McCullough for a fictional account of the great prison experiment and information on the Norfolk Island settlement of the colony.

Nice to see more excellent 'commoner' biographies.......2005-08-08

Mary Broad had a brief moment of celebrity, and this is probably one of the only reasons we know so much about the life and times of not just Broad, but others like her. Women who lived a hand to mouth existence, who trod on the wrong side of the law, and then suffered the horrific consequences of British Justice in the late Eighteenth century.

Broad was committed to transportation to the extremely new colony of New South Wales in Australia, first imprisoned on the stinking hulks which had their own brutal justice systems on board. Then the terrible long journey half way round the world, only to reach Australia and suffer famine from failed crops.

Her stoicism in spite of enormous hardship and her ability to survive are testament to an extraordinary woman, and her story of survival is amazing.

Erikson has done a great job as usual drawing from sources to outline the social aspects of the time and combining them to reflect what she lived through where her accounts are limited. Certainly, there are many accounts of male life in transporation but few remain of what women's lot were. Sian Rees published a great book a few years ago called Floating Brothel, which I would highly recommend to read with this one - it follows a transport ship of women and what happened to them on the ship and after - as the title of that book reflects it was not an easy voyage.

Mary Broad escaped from Australia and was eventually recaptured and returned to Britain where she was imprisoned again, only the intervention of the writer, Boswell (who was famous for his connection to the Johnson) garnered a royal pardon for her.

Erickson has been a prolific but good writer, I have enjoyed many of her previous biographies including and excellent one on the Regency period. It was a very good read, but my only real quibble with it is I felt it was less fluid than some I have read lately which have been page turners (without being tabloid). It had a nice measured pace and I found I was kept interested in the outcome to the end. Overall a nice interesting history which should appeal to a wide range of readers.

A Book of Human Suffering.......2005-02-24

I was aware that England used Australia as a place to send prisoners during the American Revolutionary War years and later, but I never realized how miserable the living conditions were and the human cargo that was shipped there arrived more dead than alive. Botany Bay actually was located on the southern shore of the island of Tasmania, but conditions were such that the prisoners were transferred to what is now Sydney harbor. Lawbreakers in England such as Mary Bryant were routinely sentenced to death by hanging. Mary was one of those whose life was spared and chosen to serve her sentence in Australia. After several punishing months at sea and living in filth on the ship in addition to becomming pregnant by a male passenger the group of convicts arrived at their destination. Living conditions for the prisoners encouraged everyone to plot their escape from this living hell hole. Mary, along with her husband, child, and other prisoners escaped and headed for the island of Timor. This is a story of sadistic guards who enjoyed abusing their authority by having violators whipped for escape attempts and other rule violations. Mary and her family were to be returned to England after being recaptured, but her husband and now two children both died before arriving. Mary expected to be resentenced to death, but James Boswell, a friend of King George, wrote asking for a pardon for Mary for all the trials and tribulations she had been through. His appeal was successful and Mary received a pardon along with a yearly annunity from James Boswell for her to live on. This is a book of human suffering while traveling on a ship in terrible weather in addition to the suffering while in captivity in Australia. The English weren't bashful in handing out death penalities to its citizens, and sentencing offenders to Australia to live in squalor if they survived the trip was a way of just getting these people out of their hair and the country. This is a sad chapter in the history of England.

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The Girl From Botany Bay

Manufacturer: John Wiley and Sons
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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The Memory Keeper's Daughter

ASIN: 0739462032

Product Description

Veteran biographer Erickson (Great Harry, etc.) focuses on Mary Broad, who was arrested for robbery in 1786 and transported in sordid conditions to the new penal colony in Australia. But the book is, more generally, a stark and fascinating account of what prisoners endured: in England, where harsh laws protected property in an era of unsettling social change; on board ship; and in the penal colonies themselves, where the convicts and their guards carved a bleak existence out of the inhospitable environment. Life was particularly harsh for women, who, in addition to the usual deprivations, also endured the threat of rape and the responsibilities and sorrows of raising children in dire conditions. Mary Broad, along with several male convicts and her own young children, made a daring escape in a small, stolen boat. Perhaps fortified by stories of the survivors of the Bounty, they sailed along the Australian coast and across open sea to the Dutch settlement of Kupang in Indonesia, where they enjoyed a few months of ease before their recapture. Despite Erickson's speculations, little can be known concretely about Mary as an individual. Her story draws in the reader, nonetheless, and Mary's brief moment of celebrity, when the escape and the well-timed intervention of the writer James Boswell earn her a royal pardon, provides a satisfying end to the unrelenting hardship of her life. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Boswell and the girl from Botany Bay
Frederick Albert Pottle
Manufacturer: Heinemann
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0008778MI

Girl from Botany Bay, The: The Extraordinary Story of Australia's Most Daring Escaped Convict

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Girl from Botany Bay, The: The Extraordinary Story of Australia's Most Daring Escaped Convict
Carolly Erickson
Manufacturer: Macmillan Co of Australia Pty.Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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