You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Through a Glass Darkly tells the story of Ron Hennessey, an Iowa farmer who returned from the Korean War to discover that farming no longer held much allure. Hennessey joined a Catholic missionary society and after nine years of study was ordained a priest and sent to Guatemala. The book describes Hennessey's conversion from being an unapologetic patriot from America's heartland to a staunch opponent of Ronald Reagan's policies in Central America - policies that occasionally threatened Hennessey's life. Hennessey's story has a subtext: America's ideals of freedom, democracy, and progress-with-justice have been violated abroad by one U.S. president after another.
Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker’s history of the writing of Melville biographies, enriched by his intimate working relationships with great Melvilleans, dead and living. The first part is a mesmerizing autobiographical account of what went into creating his award-winning two-volume life of Herman Melville. Next, Parker traces six decades the persistent war New Critics have waged against biographical scholarship on Melville. American literary critics, he finds, impose New Critical theories of organic unity on Melville’s disrupted career even while truncating his body of work and minimizing his aesthetic interests. Parker celebrates the "divine amateurs" who use new technology to discover dazzling Melville stories and also lauds the writers of literature blogs as potential redeemers of academic and mainstream media reviewing. In the third part, Parker invites readers into his biographical workshop and challenges them with ambitious research assignments. Throughout this bold book, Parker seeks to reinvigorate the all-but-lost art of scholarly literary criticism and biography.
This collection explores nautical themes in a variety of literary contexts from multiple cultures. Including contributors from five continents, it emphasizes the universality of human experience with the sea, while focusing on literature that spans a millennium, stretching from medieval romance to the twenty-first-century reimagining of classic literary texts in film. These fresh essays engage in discussions of literature from the UK, the USA, India, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Colombia, and the Caribbean. Scholars of maritime literature will find the collection interesting for the unique insights it offers on individual literary texts, while general readers will be intrigued by the interconnectedness that it reveals in human experience with the sea.
"Consequently, to fill the gaps within the correspondence, 542 editorial entries are chronologically interspersed for letters both by and to Melville for which no full text has been located but for which some evidence survives. These entries, like the editorial headnotes for the known letters, flesh out the specific historical and biographical contexts for the unlocated letters. Both supply Horth's full annotations, placing circumstances, persons, and allusions, from a wide range of documentary and scholarly sources, and drawing upon family archives of both Melville and his wife, including the recently recovered portion, now in the New York Public Library, of a trove preserved by his sister ...
"This book examines some of Melville's less-read works in order to place him as an ecological writer"--
An account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. Manz, an anthropologist, spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala. In a political portrait of Santa María Tzejá, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s, Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa María Tzejá, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives. From publisher description.
This collection of analytical essays is the result of several conferences throughout 1991, the centennary of Herman Melville's death. They survey the past and present of Melville Studies and suggest directions for the future.
In the spring of 1968, a group of Catholic anti-war activists barged into a draft board in suburban Baltimore, stole hundreds of Selective Service records, and burned the documents. The bold actions of the 'Catonsville Nine' became international news. This book tells the story of this singular witness for peace and social justice.
Hearts on Fire is the inspiring story of the Maryknoll Sisters, updated to mark the centenary of their founding in 1912. Through the voices of the Sisters themselves, Penny Lernoux draws a loving portrait of a community in constant transition and shows how in their process of growth and conversion they left an indelible mark on the church and the world.
Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016), priest, poet, peacemaker, was one of the great religious voices of our time. Jim Forest, who worked with Berrigan in building the Catholic Peace Fellowship in the 1960s, draws on his deep friendship over five decades to provide the most comprehensive and intimate picture yet available of this modern-day prophet.