Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire. A New York Times bestselling author’s gripping account of the slave rebellion that led to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike quickly turned into a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. By the time British troops had put down the rebels, more than a thousand Jamaicans lay dead from on-the-spot executions and extrajudicial murder.

While the rebels lost their military gamble, their sacrifice accelerated the larger struggle for freedom in the British Atlantic. The daring and suffering of the Jamaicans galvanized public opinion throughout the empire, resulting in a decisive turn against slavery. For centuries cruel bondage had fed Britain’s lust for sugar. Within two years of the Christmas rebellion, slavery was formally abolished.

Island on Fire is a dramatic day-by-day account of this transformative uprising. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner goes back to the primary sources to tell the intimate story of the men and women who tasted liberty for a few brief weeks. He memorably evokes the sights and sounds of the Caribbean in the 1830s, provides the first full portrait of its enigmatic leader Samuel Sharpe, and gives us a poignant glimpse of the dreams of the Jamaicans who died for liberty.

"Tom Zoellner is completely right that the 1831-32 revolt in Jamaica helped break the back of slavery in the British Empire. It’s high time that we had a book like the splendid one he has written: a highly readable but carefully documented account of the greatest of all British slave rebellions, the miseries that led to it, and the momentous changes it wrought." -- Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains

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Now in paperback from Penguin-Random House.

Here is the story of the most indispensable mode of transportation the world has ever known: the railroad.

We live in a world created by the trains. They made our modern food system, the beat of our music, our huge corporations and their financing methods, our labor unions, the shapes of national borders, the pleasant leafy suburbs that surround our major cities, our abstract notion of time and space, and our sense of connection with people who may live far out of sight but become still become our neighbors. All of these are products of the sweeping heritage of railroads.

The train and its breathing locomotive is a living symbol of sex, death, fear and romance. But it is also a serious economic engine in the modern world. China has spent more than $300 billion on a crash program to unite its provinces with freakishly-quick bullet trains, while the United States struggles to start its own network. And in an economy tied more than ever to moving goods across international borders, fresh spikes are being hammered everywhere. In a future full of doubts about petroleum supplies, there may be a train calling on your city once again.

An entertaining journey around the world by train, as well as a masterful narrative history, Tom Zoellner’s extraordinary book is a call to re-embrace the train not just as an old friend, but as a weapon against global headaches over trade, traffic, and energy. Trains never went away. We just forgot them. Now it is time to climb on board again.