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Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born; Ian Fleming’s Jamaica
Amid the lush beauty of Jamaica’s northern coast lies the true story of Ian Fleming’s iconic creation: James Bond. For two months every year, from 1946 to his death eighteen years later, Ian Fleming lived at Goldeneye, the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white-sand beach on Jamaica’s stunning north coast. All the James Bond novels and stories were written here. This book explores the huge influence of Jamaica on the creation of Fleming’s iconic postwar hero. The island was for Fleming part retreat from the world, part tangible representation of his values, and part exotic fantasy. Goldeneye also examines Fleming’s Jamaican friendships—his extraordinary circle included Errol Flynn, the Oliviers, international politicians, and British royalty, as well as his close neighbor Noël Coward—and traces his changing relationship with Ann Charteris (and hers with Jamaica) and the emergence of Blanche Blackwell as his Jamaican soul mate. Goldeneye also compares the real Jamaica of the 1950s during the buildup to independence with the island’s portrayal in the Bond books, to shine a light on the attitude of the likes of Fleming and Coward to the dramatic end of the British Empire. “Highly readable.”—Daily Telegraph (London)
Matthew Parker (Author), Roy McMillan (Narrator)
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Goldeneye: Where Bond was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica
THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Completely fascinating, authoritative and intriguing' William Boyd 'The big bang on Bond books... Beautiful, brilliant' Tony Parsons Goldeneye: the story of Ian Fleming in Jamaica and the creation of British national icon, James Bond. From 1946 until the end of his life, Ian Fleming lived for two months of every year at Goldeneye - the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white sand beach on Jamaica's north coast. All the James Bond novels and stories were written here. Fleming adored the Jamaica he had discovered, at the time an imperial backwater that seemed unchanged from the glory days of the empire. Amid its stunning natural beauty, the austerity and decline of post-war Britain could be forgotten. For Fleming, Jamaica offered the perfect mixture of British old-fashioned conservatism and imperial values, alongside the dangerous and sensual: the same curious combination that made his novels so appealing, and successful. The spirit of the island - its exotic beauty, its unpredictability, its melancholy, its love of exaggeration and gothic melodrama - infuses his writing. Fleming threw himself into the island's hedonistic Jet Set party scene: Hollywood giants, and the cream of British aristocracy, the theatre, literary society and the secret services spent their time here drinking and bed-hopping. But while the whites partied, Jamaican blacks were rising up to demand respect and self-government. And as the imperial hero James Bond - projecting British power across the world - became ever more anachronistic and fantastical, so his popularity soared. Drawing on extensive interviews with Ian's family, his Jamaican lover Blanche Blackwell and many other islanders, Goldeneye is a beautifully written, revealing and original exploration of a crucially important part of Ian Fleming's life and work.
Matthew Parker (Author), Roy McMillan (Narrator)
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The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies
To those who travel there today, the West Indies are unspoiled paradise islands. Yet that image conceals a turbulent, dramatic, and shocking history. For some two hundred years after 1650, the West Indies became the strategic center of the Western world, witnessing one of the greatest power struggles of the age as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar—a commodity so lucrative it became known as "white gold." As Matthew Parker skillfully chronicles in his sweeping history, the sugar revolution made the English, in particular, a nation of voracious consumers, so much so that the wealth of her island colonies came to underpin the entire British economy, ultimately fueling the Industrial Revolution. Yet beside the incredible wealth came untold misery: the horrors of slavery and of slaves, on whose backs the sugar empires were brutally built; the rampant disease that claimed the lives of one third of all whites within three years of arrival in the Caribbean; the cruelty, corruption, and decadence of the plantation culture. For those on the ground, the British West Indian empire presented a disturbing moral universe. Parker vividly interweaves the human stories—since lost to history—of visitors and slaves, overseers and soldiers, and of the families whose fortunes and fame rose and fell on sugar. Their wealth drove the development of the North American mainland states, and with it a slave culture, as the racist plantation model was exported to the warm southern states. Eventually opposition to sugar policy in London helped to unite the North American colonies against Britain. Broad in scope and rich in detail, The Sugar Barons freshly links the histories of Europe, the West Indies, and North America, and reveals the full impact of the sugar revolution, the resonance of which is still felt today.
Matthew Parker (Author), Jonathan Cowley (Narrator)
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Panama Fever: The Epic Story of the Building of the Panama Canal
The building of the Panama Canal was one of the greatest engineering feats in human history. A tale of exploration, conquest, money, politics, and medicine, Panama Fever charts the challenges that marked the long, labyrinthine road to the building of the canal. Drawing on a wealth of new materials and sources, Matthew Parker brings to life the men who recognized the impact a canal would have on global politics and economics, and adds new depth to the familiar story of Teddy Roosevelt’s remarkable triumph in making the waterway a reality. As thousands of workers succumbed to dysentery, yellow fever, and malaria, scientists raced to stop the deadly epidemics so that work could continue. The treatments they developed changed the course of medical history. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 spelled the end of the Victorian Age and the beginning of the “American Century.” Panama Fever brilliantly captures the innovative thinking and backbreaking labor, as well as the commercial and political interests, that helped make America a global power. “An absolutely gripping account of the canal’s conception and construction…Exemplary history, vigorously told with a respect for complexity that enriches rather than obscures the pleasure of a great story”--Los Angeles Times
Matthew Parker (Author), William Dufris (Narrator)
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