1847: A Chronicle of Genius Generosity and Savagery

About this book

Discover the eclectic characters & revolutionary events of a year that turned the world upside down. Having grown up in an Irish country house built in 1847 author and historian TURTLE BUNBURY has long been fascinated by that epic year. Determined to understand its zeitgeist he has assembled 38 remarkable stories that took place across the planet during those twelve tumultuous months. With his penchant for the quirky Bunbury confronts all manner of human enterprise to reveal a world of nobility and generosity of bold genius and fearsome savagery embracing everything from the salty seadogs who explored the Pacific and Arctic oceans to show-stopping entertainers like Lola Montez and General Tom Thumb - the intrepid pioneers who stumbled through the mountains and prairies of the Americas to the ground-breaking inventors of the doughnut the gumball and the Christmas cracker - the famine-starved Irish and persecuted German emigrants to the Vietnamese emperors war with the French - the ivory-tinkling genius of Liszt and Mendelssohn to the horse-bound Comanche warriors who dominated Texas - the American opium magnates who ran roughshod over China to the Irish soldiers who fought for Mexico. 1847 is a rollicking globe-trot that reveals a world whose heart pounded every bit as fast and as furious as it does today. By turns poignant outlandish curious and provocative this is history at its most invigorating - as panorama as epic. The 2016 Oscar-nominated director Lenny Abrahamson writes: "Ive always loved Turtles writing the wit and heartbeat in his history. 1847 is for me the best thing he has done so far. It is vivid surprising hugely entertaining; an unforgettable encounter with an extraordinary year." PRAISE FOR "THE GLORIOUS MADNESS" by TURTLE BUNBURY An absolutely brilliant book. Patrick Geoghegan Associate Professor in History at Trinity College Dublin. Turtle Bunburys open-handed clear-sighted and finely written book comes fresh and I might almost say redeemed out of the moil and storm of controversy that surrounded the topic of the war in a thousand different guises in the decades since its end. Turtle holds out his hand in the present seeking the lost hands of the past in darkness in darkness but also suddenly in the clear light of kindness - in the upshot acknowledging their imperilled existence with a brilliant flourish a veritable banner of wonderful stories. Sebastian Barry author of The Secret Scripture Turtle continues the wonderful listening and yarn-spinning he has honed in the Vanishing Ireland series applying it to veterans of the First World War.The stories he recreates are poignant whimsical and bleakly funny bringing back into the light the lives of people who found themselves on the wrong side of history after the struggle for Irish independence. This is my kind of micro-history. John Grenham The Irish Times