PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Timothy Tackett is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books, including The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution; When the King Took Flight; Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Origins of a Revolutionary Culture; and Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France.
"""Drawing on an extraordinarily riche cache of letters, this biography of an ordinary eighteenth-century Parisian gives a marvelously vivid sense of what it was like to live through the last years of France's Old Regime and to participate, at ground level, in the French Revolution. Timothy Tackett has drawn on his unparalleled expertise in the period to produce a biography that is also an illuminationDLand one that college students in particular will appreciate."" -- David A. Bell, author of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution ""This rich and evocative microhistory brings the late Old Regime and French Revolution alive through the experiences of one small-time Parisian lawyer. Adrien-Joseph Colson turns out to be a likeable and very human figure. As Timothy Tackett explores his reflections and quandaries, The Glory and the Sorrow makes for compelling reading. Once again, Tackett analyzes revolutionary dynamics with insight and vision."" -- Suzanne Desan, author of The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France ""Adrien Colson's letters reveal how utterly unexpected the French Revolution was for all who lived through it and how everyday citizens of Paris managed to ride the successive waves of optimism, excitement, uncertainty, and fear. Beautifully contextualized by one of the leading historians of the French Revolution, this book makes you feel like a witness to history. Unless you know how to travel through time, you can't get much closer to the events of the French Revolution than this."" -- Paul Friedland, Cornell University ""There is no better way to experience the hopes, anxieties, and terrors churned out by the French Revolution than this very personal account of an ordinary man in Paris and no better guide to making sense of that experience than Tim Tackett. He has that rare talent for finding archival gems and then gracefully revealing their significance. The reader can't help but feel what Adrien Colson feels as he encounters the excitement, mysteries, and disappointments of revolutionary Paris."" -- Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why It Matters"
