John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) was one of the prominent figure of American politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. The son of a slaveholding South Carolina family, he served in the federal government in various capacities—as senator from his home state, as secretary of war and secretary of state, and as vice-president in the administrations of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Calhoun was a staunch supporter of the interests of his state and region. His battle from tariff reform, aimed at alleviating the economic problems of the southern states, eventually led him to formulate his famous nullification doctrine, which asserted the right of states to declare federal laws null and void within their own boundaries. In the first full-scale biography of Calhoun in almost half a century, John Niven skillfully presents a new interpretation of this preeminent spokesman of the Old South. Deftly blending Calhoun’s public career with important elements of his private life, Niven shows Calhoun to have been at once a more consistent politician and a far more complex human being than previous historians have thought. Rather than history’s image of an assured, self-confident Calhoun, Niven reveals a figure who was in many ways insecure and defensive. Niven maintains that the War of 1812, which Calhoun helped instigate and which nearly resulted in the nation’s ruin, made a lasting impression on Calhoun’s mind and personality. From that point until the end of his life, he sought security first from the western Indians and the British while he was secretary of war, then from northern exploitation of southern wealth through what he regarded as manipulation of public policy while he was vice-president and a senator. He worked tirelessly to further the South’s slave-plantation system of economic and social values. He sought protection for a region that he freely admitted was low in population and poor in material resources, and he defended a position that he knew was morally inferior. Niven portrays Calhoun as a driven, tragic figure whose ambitions and personal desires to achieve leadership and compensate for a lack of inner assurance were often thwarted. The life he made for himself, the peace he felt on his plantation with his dependent retainers, and the agricultural pursuits that represented to him and his neighbors stability in a rapidly changing environment were beyond price. Calhoun sought to resist any menace to this way of life with all the force of his character and intellect. Yet in the end Calhoun’s headstrong allegiance to his region helped to destroy the very culture he sought to preserve and disrupted the Union he had hoped to keep whole. Niven’s masterful retelling of Calhoun’s eventful life is a model biography.
I love John Niven's writing – OBVIOUSLY – but came late to his first book, and was blown away by what vivid, delicate time-travel it is. Every The Band fan in the world MUST read it - it's like living in the music. Just smoky, ravishing magic' Caitlin Moran Timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the release of The Band's debut album, Music from Big Pink is John Niven's first novel – a heady blend of drugs, music, sixties counter-culture and intoxicating youth. Greg Keltner is a 23-year-old drug-dealer and wannabe musician. Through his eyes, we witness the gestation of a record that will go on to cast its spell across five decades – bewitching and inspiring artists as disparate as The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Wilco and Mercury Rev. Music From Big Pink is faction: real people like Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Bob Dylan and Albert Grossman rub shoulders with fictional characters and imagined scenarios. Featuring a new foreword from Barney Hoskyns and a new introduction from the author, Music from Big Pink gives us a unique and vivid insight into the birth and legacy of The Band's debut album.
This is the story of John Niven, founder of Purity Stores—a chain of grocery stores across California as far south as Fresno and as far north as Yreka. Established in the San Francisco area in 1925, this chain operated most of its stores along the Pacific coastline, many of them in small towns. In John Niven, explore John Niven’s career as he starts with Van Camp Packing Company. From there, he joins Cummins Engines with notable businessmen Clessie Cummins, William G. Irwin, and A. D. Lasker, before founding Purity Stores. Author John David Noll, a grandson of John Niven, traces the history of this successful businessman through newspaper articles, correspondence, and family chronicles as John faces challenges from the Great Depression, World War II, warehouse strikes, price wars, unions, and expansion pressures from competitors.
A biography of Salmon P. Chase, one of the principal political figures in the American Civil War period. A rival to Abraham Lincoln for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1860, he subsequently became Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln's war-time cabinet.
Music From Big Pink is a moving book that succeeds not just in vividly evoking its time and place but in distilling one young man's cliched and minor destiny into something approaching tragedy....This well-written first novel captures not just some of the dreams of that bygone era, but the way those dreams died." -Greg Kamiya, The New York Times Book Review Music From Big Pink is faction: real people like Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Bob Dylan and Albert Grossman rub shoulders with fictional characters and actual, documented events thread their way through text alongside imagined scenarios. Through the eyes of 23-year-old Greg Keltner, drug-dealer and wannabe musician, we witness the gestation and birth of a record that will go on to cast its spell across five decades - bewitching and inspiring artists as disparate as The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Travis, Wilco and Mercury Rev.
***Now available for preorder- KILL 'EM ALL, the stunning sequel to KILL YOUR FRIENDS***What do you do when the homeless man on the street you?ve just given money to thanks you by name and turns out to be one of your 'closest? friends, one you haven?t seen for over twenty years? Take him for a hot meal and see him on his way? Give him a lot more money than you usually would? Or take him in and try to get him back on his feet? For Alan, there?s no question - only natural that he?d want to see his old mate Craig off the streets, even if only for a few nights, and into some clean clothes. But what if the successful life you?ve made for yourself - good job, happy marriage, lovely kids, grand Victorian house (you did well out of the property boom, thank you very much) - is one that that your old pal would quite like to have too? Even if it means taking it from you? Gradually, inevitably, mayhem ensues as Craig turns Alan?s orderly household upside down, threatening to wreck Alan?s life for good. Following the divergent lives of two childhood friends, No Good Deed is a funny and painful examination of friendship; of the strange currents of ambition, loathing, pity and affection that flow between people over the decades; and of men getting older as they fail and succeed.
The Son of God is back on Earth and starring on American Pop Star. God takes a look at the Earth around the time of the Renaissance and everything looks pretty good - so he takes a holiday. In Heaven-time this is just a week's fishing trip, but on Earth several hundred years go by. When God returns, he finds all hell has broken loose: world wars, holocausts, famine, capitalism and Christians. Everywhere. There's only one thing for it. They're sending the kid back. JC, reborn, is a struggling musician in New York City, trying to teach the one true commandment: Be Nice! His best chance to win hearts and minds is to enter American Pop Star. But the number one show in America is the unholy creation of a record executive who's more than a match for the Son of God... Steven Stelfox.
A terrifying, evocative and gut-wrenching thriller -- announcing the arrival of a major new voice in the genre. You thought you could leave the past behind. Think again. Donnie Miller counts himself lucky. Living in a beautiful, spacious house in the wild and remote landscape of central Canada, he spends his days writing for the local newspaper, working on a film script, and acting as house-husband. After a troubled and impoverished upbringing in Scotland, he now has all he wants: a caring wife, a bright and happy son, a generous father-in-law. As the brutal northern winter begins to bite, he can sit back and enjoy life. But his peace is soon broken. There are noises in the nearby woods, signs of some mysterious watcher. When the family dog disappears, Donnie makes a horrifying discovery. Is it wolves, as the police suspect, or something far more dangerous, far darker? What secrets has Donnie been keeping? And why does he have the terrible sense that his dream was never going to last? A taut, shocking and visceral thriller that will leave you gasping for breath, "Cold Hands" is the first in an exciting new series by the remarkable John J. Niven.
This is the story of John Niven, founder of Purity Stores—a chain of grocery stores across California as far south as Fresno and as far north as Yreka. Established in the San Francisco area in 1925, this chain operated most of its stores along the Pacific coastline, many of them in small towns. In John Niven, explore John Niven’s career as he starts with Van Camp Packing Company. From there, he joins Cummins Engines with notable businessmen Clessie Cummins, William G. Irwin, and A. D. Lasker, before founding Purity Stores. Author John David Noll, a grandson of John Niven, traces the history of this successful businessman through newspaper articles, correspondence, and family chronicles as John faces challenges from the Great Depression, World War II, warehouse strikes, price wars, unions, and expansion pressures from competitors.
AN INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE A GUARDIAN BEST MEMOIR OF 2023 A WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2023 AN iNEWS BEST BOOK TO GIFT John Niven’s little brother Gary was fearless, popular, stubborn, handsome, hilarious and sometimes terrifying. In 2010, after years of chaotic struggle against the world, he took his own life at the age of 42. Hoping for the best while often witnessing the worst, John, his younger sister Linda and their mother, Jeanette, saw the darkest fears they had for Gary played out in drug deals, prison and bankruptcy. While his life spiralled downward and the love the Nivens shared was tested to its limit, John drifted into his own trouble in the music industry, a world where excess was often a marker of success. Tracking the lives of two brothers in changing times – from illicit cans of lager in 70s sitting rooms to ecstasy in 90s raves – O Brother is a tender, affecting and often uproariously funny story. It is about the bonds of family and how we try to keep the finest of those we lose alive. It is about black sheep and what it takes to break the ties that bind. Fundamentally it is about how families survive suicide, ‘that last cry, from the saddest outpost.’
You thought you could leave the past behind. Think again. Donnie Miller counts himself lucky. Living in a beautiful, spacious house in the wild and remote landscape of central Canada, he spends his days writing for the local newspaper, working on a film script, and acting as house-husband. After a troubled and impoverished upbringing in Scotland, he now has all he wants: a caring wife, a bright and happy son, a generous father-in-law. As the brutal northern winter begins to bite, he can sit back and enjoy life. But his peace is soon broken. There are noises in the nearby woods, signs of some mysterious watcher. When the family dog disappears, Donnie makes a horrifying discovery. Is it wolves, as the police suspect, or something far more dangerous, far darker? What secrets has Donnie been keeping? And why does he have the terrible sense that his dream was never going to last? A taut, shocking and visceral novel that will leave you gasping for breath, Cold Hands is the first thriller by the remarkable John Niven.
It s not dog-eat-dog around here...it s dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known. Meet Steven Stelfox. London 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. Twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, a world where no one knows anything and where careers are made and broken by chance and the fickle tastes of the general public Yeah, those animals . Fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine Stelfox blithely criss-crosses the globe ( New York, Cologne, Texas, Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit card slips and all that really changes is the quality of the porn ) searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification. But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career. Kill Your Friends is a dark, satirical and hysterically funny evisceration of the record business, a place populated by frauds, charlatans and bluffers, where ambition is a higher currency than talent, and where it seems anything can be achieved as long as you want it badly enough.
»„Music from Big Pink“ ist die Geschichte eines kleinen Drogendealers, der sich im Umfeld einer erfolgreichen Rockband auf der Höhe ihres Erfolgs rumtreibt. Als Dealer hat man häufig engen Kontakt mit Stars, man kommt in die Backstageräume, die Limos, die Privatjets – man hat überall Zugang. Ich fragte mich, ob ich so eine Figur wohl mit einer realen Rockband kombinieren und die Geschichte mit dem Entstehen eines Rock- Klassikers verflechten könne. Die Musik von The Band und die Zeit, welche sie Mitte der 1960er mit Dylan in Woodstock verbracht haben, schien mir dafür perfekt geeignet.« John Niven, 2011
At the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, communist prisoners organized resistance against the SS and even planned an uprising. They helped rescue a three-year-old Jewish boy, Stefan Jerzy Zweig, from certain death in the gas chambers. After the war, his story became a focus for the German Democratic Republic's celebration of its resistance to the Nazis. Now Bill Niven tells the true story of Stefan Zweig: what actually happened to him in Buchenwald, how he was protected, and at what price. He explores the (mis)representation of Zweig's rescue in East Germany and what this reveals about that country's understanding of its Nazi past. Finally he looks at the telling of the Zweig rescue story since German unification: a story told in the GDR to praise communists has become a story used to condemn them. Bill Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at the Nottingham Trent University, UK.
This is the first of a proposed six-volume edition of the selected papers of Salmon Portland Chase (1808-1873), a notable figure in the anti-slavery movement and American politics of the 19th century. This volume includes his Civil War-era diaries and his account of a tour of the South in 1865.
Scharfzüngig und wunderbar komisch Kennedy Marr ist ein Autor der alten Schule. Irisch, zynisch bis zum Anschlag, ein Borderline-Alkoholiker und Sex-Süchtiger. Sein Mantra lautet: hart trinken, gut essen und jede Frau flachlegen, die bei drei nicht auf den Bäumen ist. Mittlerweile als Drehbuchautor in L. A. ansässig, flucht er sich durch die kalifornische Literatur- und Filmszene. Doch sein verschwenderischer Lebensstil bringt ihn an den Rand des Bankrotts, bis sich unverhofft eine Lösung anbietet. In England wird er für einen hoch dotierten Literaturpreis vorgeschlagen. Um an das Geld zu kommen, gilt es allerdings, mehrere konfliktbeladene Auflagen zu erfüllen.
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