Savage Shorthand - The Life and Death of Isaac Babel

What if?

What if the descendants of the Vikings who settled Greenland and went on to reach North America around the end of the first millennium were still there today?

What if the Vikings had enjoyed a five hundred year head start on Columbus in the New World? Would the Santa Maria have arrived to the south of an eastern seaboard dotted with centuries old settlements and towns hosting devotees to Odin and Thor?

What if the Vikings’ descendants had gone on to become dominant just as the United States of America has in our own world? A millennium after reaching Greenland, Vinland and Markland would we still have had two world wars? What might the world look like? Where might the political and religious divides be drawn?

Welcome to the New World.

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The United States of Vinland (The Markland Trilogy): The Landing

Following the turn of the first millennium the Vikings are expanding beyond northern Europe by way of axe and trade. Their spreading influence and settlements, founded by warriors, farmers and merchants, can not only be found in the far flung corners of the continent, but also across the Atlantic, beyond the stepping stones of the Faroe Islands and Iceland, as they establish themselves in the newly discovered lands in the west.

In Europe growing influence brings wealth, and together they fire contests of power, as the Viking Age of adventuring free spirits gives way to a world of rising kings. At the same time a strengthening tide of missionaries proclaiming an alien faith can be found in the Norse homelands. The agents of the White Christ, often in alliance with the new monarchs, have opened divisions between themselves and those who still revere the old ways, such tensions lead to war and bloodshed, yet the new powers are ascendant.

In this time of turmoil a young man has a vision.

Eskil, orphaned in war, but now a man, is leading his followers to found a settlement in the west dedicated to Odin and Asgard’s gods. There he will build a new realm, and after tests, adventures and trials, he will leave a legacy that will grow to be the strongest nation the world has ever seen.

Welcome to Norse America.

The Landing is the first book in The United States of Vinland series and is an alternate history that tells the sagas of the establishment of the first Markland halls.

Ferdinand Ward was the greatest swindler of the Gilded Age. Through his unapologetic villainy, he bankrupted Ulysses S. Grant and ran roughshod over the entire world of finance. Now, his compelling, behind-the-scenes story is told—told by his great-grandson, award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward.
Ward was the Bernie Madoff of his day, a supposed genius at making big money fast on Wall Street who turned out to have been running a giant pyramid scheme—one that ultimately collapsed in one of the greatest financial scandals in American history. The son of a Protestant missionary and small-town pastor with secrets of his own to keep, Ward came to New York at twenty-one and in less than a decade, armed with charm, energy, and a total lack of conscience, made himself the business partner of the former president of the United States and was widely hailed as the “Young Napoleon of Finance.” In truth, he turned out to be a complete fraud, his entire life marked by dishonesty, cowardice, and contempt for anything but his own interests.
Drawing from thousands of family documents never before examined, Geoffrey C. Ward traces his great-grandfather’s rapid rise to riches and fame and his even more dizzying fall from grace. There are mistresses and mansions along the way; fast horses and crooked bankers and corrupt New York officials; courtroom confrontations and six years in Sing Sing; and Ferdinand’s desperate scheme to kidnap his own son to get his hands on the estate his late wife had left the boy. Here is a great story about a classic American con artist, told with boundless charm and dry wit by one of our finest historians.
 

“The world’s most fascinating battles and how they were won or lost, according to the Chinese sage.”—Kirkus Reviews

One month in 1865 witnessed the frenzied fall of Richmond, a daring last-ditch Southern plan for guerrilla warfare, Lee's harrowing retreat, and then, Appomattox. It saw Lincoln's assassination just five days later and a near-successful plot to decapitate the Union government, followed by chaos and coup fears in the North, collapsed negotiations and continued bloodshed in the South, and finally, the start of national reconciliation.

In the end, April 1865 emerged as not just the tale of the war's denouement, but the story of the making of our nation.

Jay Winik offers a brilliant new look at the Civil War's final days that will forever change the way we see the war's end and the nation's new beginning. Uniquely set within the larger sweep of history and filled with rich profiles of outsize figures, fresh iconoclastic scholarship, and a gripping narrative, this is a masterful account of the thirty most pivotal days in the life of the United States.