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Find out moreFrank Lambert always wanted to be a Zangulator, but had to settle for being a Chartered Engineer. He lives in North East England with his family and a Jack Russell who always looks guilty. While completing a Masters in Creative Writing, Napoleon Xylophone introduced himself. This is his first novel.
A darkly quirky and action packed fantasy adventure that proclaims it’s not only ok to be different, it can at times, actually be an advantage. 15 year old Napoleon, also known as Zam, lives in Newcastle, he has a walking disability, he’s best friends with a polecat called Rat and a girl called Ezzy, and he lives with his inventor grandfather Eli. When the dangerously frightening wyte Ackx threatens his whole existence, Zam travels beneath his city and finds a world he knew nothing about. It took a little while to get used to the style and creatures of this underworld, once I’d settled in, I rather enjoyed the chills and terrors that awaited. Zam is a boy of grit and determination, and his heart is full of love for his friends and family. Frank Lambert has created a new champion, and he's someone I’d want by my side if I ever ventured into the intimidating and creepy underworld that can be found inside ‘Napoleon Xylophone’.
James Habersham was an early American success story. After arriving in Savannah in 1738, he failed in his efforts to wrest a living from the Georgia wilderness and lived his first year at public expense. Then, by dint of his own efforts and through the connections he forged, Habersham emerged as one of the colony's most influential and prosperous citizens, making his name as a planter, merchant, evangelist, and political leader. The third wealthiest person in the colony at the time of his death in 1775, Habersham had a public career that included service as the secretary of Georgia, president of the King's Council, and acting Governor. But Habersham's story is more than biography. It also provides a window into colonial Georgia and its transformation from a struggling colony on the brink of collapse in the 1740s to a prosperous province in the 1770s, confident enough to defy the Crown. Ranging over such topics as the rise of Methodist missionary fervor, the development of transatlantic trade, the introduction of slavery, and the escalating debate over American independence, Frank Lambert tells how Habersham's success is inextricably tied to Georgia's fortunes and how he played a major role in helping the colony exploit its abundant resources. Habersham's economic development plan provided a blueprint for attracting new settlers, supplying an abundance of cheap labor, and opening new markets. Habersham's achievements, however, are obscured by his unpopular stance on American independence. While his three sons distinguished themselves as Patriots, Habersham remained loyal to the Crown, though he had opposed Britain's new imperial policies in the 1760s. Nevertheless, it was Habersham's loyal service to colonial Georgia that enabled the colony to separate successfully from the mother country and assume its place in the new republic as a prosperous, vigorous state.
Frank Lambert tackles the central claims of the Religious Right historians who insist that America was conceived as a Christian State, that modern-day liberals and secularists have distorted and/or ignored the place of religion in American history, and that the phrase the separation of church and state does not appear in any of the founding documents and is, therefore, a myth created by the Left. He discusses what separates bad history from good history, and concludes that the self-styled historians of the Religious Right create a useful past that enlists the nation's founders on behalf of present-day conservative religious and political causes. Lambert believes that the most effective means of critiquing such misuse of history is sound historical investigation that considers all the evidence, not just that which support's an author's biases, and draws reasonable conclusions grounded in historical context.
A changeling padded out from the shadows at the far end of the cavern. It had taken on the form of a lioness, with fur as black as a starless night. It walked towards Ackx and began to lick its master's face. Ackx opened his eyes and something like a smile crossed his face. Something like the smile a crocodile makes while eating its lunch... Napoleon Xylophone hates his name; that's why his friends call him Zam. He doesn't know it yet, but he is set to become a hero - a hero with a walking disability. When adventure comes knocking, Zam doesn't let his disability get in the way of fighting the changelings, wytes and gargoyles that come to life in the underworld beneath Newcastle. Not when he has a wheelchair that can fly, a ghost for a best friend and a grandfather who has created a new life form that allows whoever wears it to speak to Time... Napoleon Xylophone is an inspirational work of fantasy fiction that will appeal to 12-16 year old children. The main aim of the book is to give disabled children a voice to help them express how they fit into society. As Zam, one of the few disabled superheroes in fiction, travels through the pages of his story, he shows the difficulties disabled children encounter every day. Zam is more than a teenager in a wheelchair with an amazing story to tell; he is a hero anyone can look up to.
The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention blocked the establishment of Christianity as a national religion. But they could not keep religion out of American politics. From the election of 1800, when Federalist clergymen charged that deist Thomas Jefferson was unfit to lead a Christian nation, to today, when some Democrats want to embrace the so-called Religious Left in order to compete with the Republicans and the Religious Right, religion has always been part of American politics. In Religion in American Politics, Frank Lambert tells the fascinating story of the uneasy relations between religion and politics from the founding to the twenty-first century. Lambert examines how antebellum Protestant unity was challenged by sectionalism as both North and South invoked religious justification; how Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth competed with the anticapitalist Social Gospel during postwar industrialization; how the civil rights movement was perhaps the most effective religious intervention in politics in American history; and how the alliance between the Republican Party and the Religious Right has, in many ways, realized the founders' fears of religious-political electoral coalitions. In these and other cases, Lambert shows that religion became sectarian and partisan whenever it entered the political fray, and that religious agendas have always mixed with nonreligious ones. Religion in American Politics brings rare historical perspective and insight to a subject that was just as important--and controversial--in 1776 as it is today.
How did the United States, founded as colonies with explicitly religious aspirations, come to be the first modern state whose commitment to the separation of church and state was reflected in its constitution? Frank Lambert explains why this happened, offering in the process a synthesis of American history from the first British arrivals through Thomas Jefferson's controversial presidency. Lambert recognizes that two sets of spiritual fathers defined the place of religion in early America: what Lambert calls the Planting Fathers, who brought Old World ideas and dreams of building a City upon a Hill, and the Founding Fathers, who determined the constitutional arrangement of religion in the new republic. While the former proselytized the one true faith, the latter emphasized religious freedom over religious purity. Lambert locates this shift in the mid-eighteenth century. In the wake of evangelical revival, immigration by new dissenters, and population expansion, there emerged a marketplace of religion characterized by sectarian competition, pluralism, and widened choice. During the American Revolution, dissenters found sympathetic lawmakers who favored separating church and state, and the free marketplace of religion gained legal status as the Founders began the daunting task of uniting thirteen disparate colonies. To avoid discord in an increasingly pluralistic and contentious society, the Founders left the religious arena free of government intervention save for the guarantee of free exercise for all. Religious people and groups were also free to seek political influence, ensuring that religion's place in America would always be a contested one, but never a state-regulated one. An engaging and highly readable account of early American history, this book shows how religious freedom came to be recognized not merely as toleration of dissent but as a natural right to be enjoyed by all Americans.
A pioneer in the commercialization of religion, George Whitefield (1714-1770) is seen by many as the most powerful leader of the Great Awakening in America: through his passionate ministry he united local religious revivals into a national movement before there was a nation. An itinerant British preacher who spent much of his adult life in the American colonies, Whitefield was an immensely popular speaker. Crossing national boundaries and ignoring ecclesiastical controls, he preached outdoors or in public houses and guild halls. In London, crowds of more than thirty thousand gathered to hear him, and his audiences exceeded twenty thousand in Philadelphia and Boston. In this fresh interpretation of Whitefield and his age, Frank Lambert focuses not so much on the evangelist's oratorical skills as on the marketing techniques that he borrowed from his contemporaries in the commercial world. What emerges is a fascinating account of the birth of consumer culture in the eighteenth century, especially the new advertising methods available to those selling goods and services--or salvation. Whitefield faced a problem similar to that of the new Atlantic merchants: how to reach an ever-expanding audience of anonymous strangers, most of whom he would never see face-to-face. To contact this mass congregation, Whitefield exploited popular print, especially newspapers. In addition, he turned to a technique later imitated by other evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham: the deployment of advance publicity teams to advertise his coming presentations. Immersed in commerce themselves, Whitefield's auditors appropriated him as a well-publicized English import. He preached against the excesses and luxuries of the spreading consumer society, but he drew heavily on the new commercialism to explain his mission to himself and to his transatlantic audience.
This book is a history of an astounding transatlantic phenomenon, a popular evangelical revival known in America as the first Great Awakening (1735-1745). Beginning in the mid-1730s, supporters and opponents of the revival commented on the extraordinary nature of what one observer called the great ado, with its extemporaneous outdoor preaching, newspaper publicity, and rallies of up to 20,000 participants. Frank Lambert, biographer of Great Awakening leader George Whitefield, offers an overview of this important episode and proposes a new explanation of its origins. The Great Awakening, however dramatic, was nevertheless unnamed until after its occurrence, and its leaders created no doctrine nor organizational structure that would result in a historical record. That lack of documentation has allowed recent scholars to suggest that the movement was invented by nineteenth-century historians. Some specialists even think that it was wholly constructed by succeeding generations, who retroactively linked sporadic happenings to fabricate an alleged historic development. Challenging these interpretations, Lambert nevertheless demonstrates that the Great Awakening was invented--not by historians but by eighteenth-century evangelicals who were skillful and enthusiastic religious promoters. Reporting a dramatic meeting in one location in order to encourage gatherings in other places, these men used commercial strategies and newly popular print media to build a revival--one that they also believed to be an extraordinary work of God. They saw a special meaning in contemporary events, looking for a transatlantic pattern of revival and finding a motive for spiritual rebirth in what they viewed as a moral decline in colonial America and abroad. By examining the texts that these preachers skillfully put together, Lambert shows how they told and retold their revival account to themselves, their followers, and their opponents. His inquiries depict revivals as cultural productions and yield fresh understandings of how believers spread the word with whatever technical and social methods seem the most effective.
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