
Making Haste from Babylon
The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History
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Narrated by:
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Bernadette Dunne
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By:
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Nick Bunker
At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky over the northern hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Arctic, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning of doom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrims prepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, the atmosphere remained charged with fear and expectation. Men and women readied themselves for war, pestilence, or divine retribution. Against this background, and amid deep economic depression, the Pilgrims conceived their enterprise of exile.
Within a decade, despite crisis and catastrophe, they built a thriving settlement at New Plymouth, based on beaver fur, corn, and cattle. In doing so, they laid the foundations for Massachusetts, New England, and a new nation. Using a wealth of new evidence from landscape, archaeology, and hundreds of overlooked or neglected documents, Nick Bunker gives a vivid and strikingly original account of the Mayflower project and the first decade of the Plymouth Colony. From mercantile London and the rural England of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I to the mountains and rivers of Maine, he weaves a rich narrative that combines religion, politics, money, science, and the sea.
The Pilgrims were entrepreneurs as well as evangelicals, political radicals as well as Christian idealists. Making Haste from Babylon tells their story in unrivaled depth, from their roots in religious conflict and village strife at home to their final creation of a permanent foothold in America.
©2010 Nick Bunker (P)2010 Random HouseListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
“One opens this book with a weary sense of resignation. More hagiography about national origins? Another group of founders? The Pilgrims? The Mayflower? The Compact? The first Thanksgiving? A ‘new history’? Please! Enough already. And yet…it’s not like that, not at all. To the contrary, Nick Bunker offers a remarkably fresh take on (it’s true) an old and well-worn story… The evidence...adds up to a picture so full and vivid as to constitute a virtual ground-level tour of an otherwise lost world.” ---The Washington Post
“A meticulous exploration of the lives of the Pilgrims before they even set sail…It’s a comprehensive work of genius and a delight to read.” ---GalleyCat.com
“A wonderfully engaging study…There is so much here that is fresh and invigorating that Making Haste from Babylon will seem to some lovers of early American history a real page-turner with new readings and perceptive takes in each chapter. Bunker has written that rarest of books – a scholarly history with all the narrative punch of a novel.” ---The Providence Journal
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Excellent
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The reader is very clear and listenable. Her only flaw is that she pronounces a lot of English place names wrongly, including Warwick, Norwich, and Southwark, which are central to the story. I was unable to stop getting angry about this, but perhaps I just need to chill out more.
Excellent, detailed and eye-opening
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Should have had a British reader
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Once again, what was really going on
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Makes the pilgrim period real
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He took great care to be realistic in the fact that there are so many unknowns. Few historical accounts so freely admit that they ( the author and their colleagues) just don't know something. However, he did cover the gaps with several possible and probable guess-timations, admitting he could be off base and what may have influenced a misunderstanding.
I liked that he covered little tidbits about other Mayflower historians through the ages, pointing out where they may be right or wrong and what new evidence or discoveries may put their conclusions into question. He combined modern day topographical references to what would have been seen in the 1600s. I'm a New Englander, so it was especially close to my heart.
I very much enjoyed this book and will look for more from the author. The narrator did a great job, too.
Next time, more pirates and more sex, please. But A+ all around, and a big recommendation for history buffs.
Reads Like a Good Novel For History Buffs. A+
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Poorly written, poorly presented
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S-L-O-W
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