Book Description
Faith Cross, a beautiful and purely innocent young black woman, is told by her dying mother to go and get herself "a good thing." Thus begins an extraordinary pilgrim's progress that takes Faith from the magic and mysticism of the rural South to the promises and perils of modern-day Chicago. It is an odyssey that propels Faith from the degradation of prostitution, drugs, and drink into a faceless middle-class reality, and finally into a searing tragedy that ironically leads to the discovery of the real Good Thing. National Book Award-winner Charles Johnson's first novel, originally published in 1974, puts the life-affirming soul of the African-American experience at the summit of American storytelling.
Download Description
Faith Cross is told by her dying mother to "find herself the Good Thing", although she has no idea what that is. By following this young woman's journey from her mother's Baptist funeral, to a life of prostitution and, later, a stiflingly loveless marriage in Chicago, readers can glimpse the history of twentieth-century black America, annotated with philosophic insight into the nature of identity and justice along the way. Told in the style of black folklore, with voodoo werewitches, hypocritical pentacostal preachers, wise street bums, and the philosophy of Nubian Africa, Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Faith and the Good Thing burgeons with riches. Like Voltaire's Candide with a touch of de Sade's Justine (or the protagonist of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood), Faith's Bunyonesque quest is the search of an innocent through the horrors of the world to terrible knowledge and vital understanding. This novel will dazzle the author's new and loyal fans who are discovering Johnson's early work for the first time.
Customer Reviews:
THE UNENDING QUEST.......2002-11-30
Faith Cross's mother is dying. Before she releases her spirit, the woman entreats her daughter to search for the "good thing" then she dies. Thus begins the metaphysical journey of Faith as she attempts to find the good thing. Author Charles Johnson introduces us to a woman who is not satisfied with the medicrity of life but is determined to find something far more meaningful. She wants the good thing but finding out what it is becomes her dilemma.
Faith is led into poverty, prostitution, and false promises that look like the good thing but disappoints her every time. This tale is told through the lens of folklore, philosophy
and religion. Johnson's attempt to weave all of these elements together confuses and weakens the story. The reader is never sure of just what is happening with Faith.
Johnson's characters spew out philosophical musings about the good thing but are unable to sort out their own lives. Although the musings are good, they fail to capture the attention of the reader and fall flat. I enjoyed Faith who like many of us are on the same journey seeking the good thing. Defining what the good thing is and getting it are the challenges that faces everyone. Unfortunately, Johnson was unable to clearly articulate this through this tale but it was a good effort.
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The Promise: How God Works All Things Together for Good
Robert J. Morgan
Manufacturer: B&H Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 Faith
| Christian Living
| Christianity
| Religion & Spirituality
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General
| Christian Living
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Worship
| Christian Living
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ASIN: 0805446834 |
Book Description
In
The Promise, best-selling author Robert J. Morgan (Then Sings My Soul) reveals the remarkable power of a single Bible verse—Romans 8:28 (“We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God”) that will give readers an unshakable basis for confidence and joy.
Filled with real-life illustrations of triumph over tragedy,
The Promise not only empowers us to deal effectively with everyday stress and strain, but offers solid assurance to anyone facing serious trouble. In his personable style, Morgan shares strong techniques for reversing misfortunes, finding purpose in painful situations, and turning discouragement into resilience.
Here is a book to use for yourself and share with others in every hour of need. Major sections of
The Promise include All Things Work Together . . . : For Our Good; For the Good of Others; For the Deepening of the Soul; For the Glory of God; For the Spreading of the Gospel; In Human History; In the Cemetery; Because of Jesus.
Product Description
1995 Crystal Cathedral Ministries 14 pages. This booklet is a transcript of a message delivered, extemporaneously, from the pulpit of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.
Book Description
The world's deadliest mutant Wolverine embarks on a dangerous mission of revenge, seeking justice for a young neighbor who was murdered in her sleep. Logan must use all of his lethal skills to take on a mysterious organization hell-bent on keeping its dark secrets hidden from the world.
Customer Reviews:
The Brotherhood.......2007-09-30
Collects Wolverine (v3) 1-6 by Greg Rucka & Derek Robertson.
Glad to find this still in stock! Now if I can only get my hands on volumes 2&3...
Graphic SF Reader.......2007-09-03
A sordid tale of a cult taking over a town, and a promise made to a dead girl. After this part, it basically goes :-
Wolverine 27
Cult 0 (apart from their victims).
An interesting conversation at the end between Logan and Kurt, in a mutant run bar.
The story starts, when Wolverine, having a loner fest, reading a bunch of classic novels, meets one of his neighbours. She is a woman on the run from a horrible past.
Animal or man?.......2005-12-10
As a long-time Wolverine fan, who has nevertheless not read any of the comics for years, I have to say that Wolverine: the Brotherhood rekindled my fascination with this tragic hero.
The story unfolds on two levels: one following the "Mean Man" himself in his hunt for the men who murdered his neighbour, 17 years old Lucy Braddock, after he was unable to help her when she needed it most. The other follows ATF agent Cassie Lathrop on her hunt for Wolverine after he tracks the murderers' weapons straight through her investigation.
Straightforward as the story is, though, it is not only extremely well presented and drawn, but the dialogue fits the characters so well you can almost hear them speak. There is also an added twist at the end where Logan meets Nightcrawler, or Kurt Wagner, looking for answers to the eternal questions which always haunt him: when the rage takes him, is he an animal or a man? Can he justify his actions and the lives he takes by saying his enemies are evil?
The execution of this book is the best I have seen from Marvel in a very long time, come to think about it, probably the best ever. Logan himself is a short, surly, ugly fellow who nevertheless is able to exude a certain grumpy charisma, Nightcrawler looks as freaky as he should, while still having a reassuring air and the atmosphere is generally gritty, dirty and unpolished.
In addition there are no silly, form fitting costumes, a great relief since more and more readers have come to see these as a patently silly leftover from the early days of comics, and particularly so since these days the mutants are mostly presented as trying to go unnoticed through society.
All in all this is a very good book, its one drawback (if it can be called that since it is not to do with this book as such) is that it is being followed up by two more, Coyote Crossing and Return of the Native, and while they are good reads they are not as good as the Brotherhood. For one thing the style and artwork of one these two is very different, breaking the feeling that they are really interconnected. Despite this, though, they are also highly recommended.
So for both new and old fans of the grittiest, nastiest and decidedly most mature Marvel hero out there, this book is as good as they get, and I could not recommend it more.
Like the Gritty side of Wolverine?.......2005-09-28
Great look and feel to this book. If you like the down and dirty "gritty" Wolverine this is the book for you. The style of art fits the premise of the story perfectly. In my reviews I like to keep it simple as possible. Im not interested in looking smart, just trying to help steer people in a good direction. Exit here!
Great for established fans and newcomers alike.......2005-03-28
Those of us that have been reading Wolverine for a while know very few things for certain about everyone's favorite Canadian X-Man, but two things we know for sure are 1. He hates cults, nazis, and bullies and 2. He has a soft spot for girls in trouble. These two elements clash in this graphic novel.
When Lucy Braddock, the waitress at Logan's favorite café and his neighbor is murdered after asking for Logan's protection, he will not rest until he finds her killers. Tracking down the culprits with little more information than what kind of gun he was shot with, Logan proceeds to prove he is still the best there is at what he does, and what he does often is bloody.
My favorite chapter is the last. After the blood bath of the previous issues, after Logan has to deal with physical pain, he meets Nightcrawler in a bar for a little soul searching. For long time fans, this issue was touching, harkening back to Claremont's run on X-Men, but with Greg Rucka's unique style.
Speaking of style, Rucka's writing and Robertson's art provide a unique, gritty style. Both use a highly stylized approach that is still somehow very pleasant and not overdone.
There's enough references to previous plot points in Wolverine's past to make established fans rejoice, cheer, and flinch, but a newcomer can easily pick this up and understand everything without having to spend extra on more books.
Highest recommendations!
Average customer rating:
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Abyss of Elysium - Mars Wars
Dennis Chamberland
Manufacturer: Quantum Editions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Adventure
| Science Fiction
| Science Fiction & Fantasy
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General
| Science Fiction
| Science Fiction & Fantasy
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Action & Adventure
| Genre Fiction
| Literature & Fiction
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ASIN: 1889422061 |
Download Description
The earth has established twin bases on Mars. Two competing nations have founded their remote, interplanetary outposts on the red planet, separated by over two thousand kilometers of alien and hostile desert. Without warning, communications with the earth are suddenly and inexplicably lost. All systematized transmissions from earth have ceased. It is as though the earth has disappeared. Without warning or explanation, the colonists are alone in the universe. Survival on Mars is a synthesis of skill, intellect, courage as well as the most advanced technology ever developed. But in no one's blackest nightmare has anyone ever planned on permanently severing all links with the home planet. The thin barrier between life and death has just been sliced in two - and now the relatively small band of humans are no longer explorers, but now they are interplanetary castaways, waiting for a rescue that may never come. Now there are too many people and there is far too little to go around. It soon becomes apparent, they would have to fight one another to live - war on another planet becomes the only way out. Dennis Chamberland's Abyss of Elysium - Mars Wars - is filled with the full sweep of the most dramatic, high-tech, nail biting audacious adventure in the genre. Chamberland's style is characterized by a sustained extreme energy, high stakes and maximum passion, a fusion of the human drama and the technology that links the humans with an alien planet.
Book Description
Hard Science Fiction returns to the genre in this action-adventure Scifi novel with Foreword by Astronaut Scott Carpenter. In this dramatic account of life and death on a distant planet, two Mars colonies are pitted against one other. When communications with the earth is permanently lost and it becomes apparent that there will be no more re-supply, the Mars Wars begin. The moment the earth based links are lost, the clock begins ticking on the survival of two small pocket of humans isolated tens of millions of miles from earth. Set against the backdrop of a bitterly cold and lifeless desert, the American scientific colony becomes a military base as they prepare to defend themselves against the colonists of the Reunified Soviet Empire. The Americans have chosen regenerating life support systems that need few re-supplies. But the RSE base has chosen physical - chemical methods that require a constant stream of supplies from the home planet. The first war on! Mars is inevitable. For the human race to survive, a lot of people are going to have to die…
Customer Reviews:
A Great Story - Highly Recommended.......2004-08-13
Mars Wars - Abyss of Elysium is a story of two international colonies on Mars who become stranded after the earth apparently destroys itself in a nuclear war. It is an exciting and well developed book with an fascinating premise, exciting and non-stop plot as well as colorful characters. The best thing that can be said about this book is that it paints detailed, real picture of a real world Mars colony using up to date information about technologies that would really be used on a Mars expedition. There is no fake science, no black-box technology and no alien gadgetry. And it is all wrapped up in an winning storyline.
This story opens with a Martian sandstorm called a "redwind". The description of this storm immediately lent the author much credibility as he described the effects of a wind of hundreds of kilometers per hour in the near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. The Martian environment is consistently described accurately throughout the book which is a refreshing change over most authors who have little grounding in real science and wish to paint Mars and every other planet as a remote twin of the earth. Dennis Chamberland succeeds in consistently painting an accurate description of Mars as distinctly Marslike. The author is obviously either a scientist or engineer and the reader inescapably feels that tone throughout, but it is not at all tedious or even difficult. He carefully describes and explains what could be complex ideas in an easy, entertaining style that is usually cleanly integrated into the storyline. Such nuances as dealing with extra light gravity in everyday affairs, the extra long Martian day and he even provides a Martian calendar showing the months and days in its 668 day year. The book even features colony drawings and quite a few real Mars charts and maps showing real locations on Mars where the story takes place.
But most readers will inevitably worry about the characters and there is a real adventure and well told story here written in a refreshing, engaging style. The author embeds a double sided mystery, some romantic tension and multiple storylines between the two Mars colonies. Mars Wars - Abyss of Elysium is a winner - worth the cover cost and well worth the read!
Book Description
This book is about the multiplicity of gods and religions that characterized the Roman world before Constantine. It was not the noble gods such as Jove, Apollo and Diana, who were crucial to the lives of the common people in the empire, but gods of an altogether more earthly, earthy level, whose rituals and observances may now seem bizarre. The book opens with an account of the nature of popular religion and the way in which the gods and myths of subject peoples were taken up by the Roman colonizers and spread throughout the empire. Successive chapters are devoted to the Great Mother, Isis, the cults of Syria, Mithras, The Horsemen, Dionysus, and to practices related to the performance of magic. It was above all with these popular religions that the early Christians fought for supremacy. In the concluding part of the book Professor Turcan describes this contest and its eventual outcome in the triumph of Christianity throughout the Roman world. The author assumes little background or specialist knowledge. Each chapter is fully referenced and where appropriate illustrated with photographs and diagrams. The book includes a guide for further reading specifically for English-speaking students. As well as being of wide general interest, this book will appeal to students of the Roman Empire and of the history of religion.
Customer Reviews:
Encyclopedic!.......2007-08-11
I used this text in preparing a 4 session workshop on ancient mystery religions (www.lukeion.org). I appreciate that this text is thourough and attempted a balanced position on the death of these religions and the rise of Christianity. I believe Turcan did a better job with task one than with task two. The primary drawback to this text is that it has the less-than-stimulating literary style of an older encyclopedia. Final summation: great reference work if you know the larger issues up for debate on Roman Cults. Excellent, scholarly, one-stop shopping for most cults of interest.
The Travels of the Gods.......2005-05-23
This book contains copius information regarding the geographic spread of various pagen "Gods" not members of the original Roman pantheon. If you need this information, the book becomes indespensible and should be in any serious students library who is concerned with the religious atmosphere of the Roman World circa 300 BCE to 400 CE. This being said, that is the long and the short of it. The translation from French is not the best. The deeper insights one might expect are largely missing. And the explanation of the triumph of Christianity as presented is shallow and of little value. This book, one of a series of translations and reissues in the English language, commissioned by the University of Manchester, hangs its hat on the fact that it is an update of the classic work of Franz Cumont. For the generalist, the book is a loss and confusing. For the specialist, who needs a travelogue of certain Gods, the book is indespensible. Expect to work hard for what you get. Expect the prose to flow like mud, and where the translation breaks down expect confusion. I stress that this was a necessary read for my interests. There is much to be gained here. You only have to decide if you wish to pay the price.
The New Franz Cumont.......2001-02-21
Turcan has given us the needed updating on Franz Cumont's work. The Cults of the Roman Empire, for the most part, avoids the unwarrented history-of-religions inferences Cumont made. Turcan sticks mainly to geographical evidence and iconographic description and analysis. This book is a necessary companion to Keith Hopkins' "A World Full of Gods" in that is conveys the individual and collective power of the so-called Oriental cults, which, in fact, were Romanized when they reached their zenith in the Antonine Age. According to Turcan the oriental gods who had the greatest following were Magna Mater (Cybele) and Isis. Mithras occupied a second tier in the popularity pole as did Jupiter Dolichenus. Other deities interested primarily local cultists. The chapter on Dionysus and his rites is especially interesting in that the author details the ritual and presents instructive data on the belief in afterlife. Turcan does stray from the positivist historian to offer his psychological explanations for the victory of christianity over the cults. While sympathizing with his views, I think he has glossed over the more important socio-political explanation: episcopal christianity alone provided the strongest social cohesiveness enforced by ecclesiastical sanctions. It was this strength that moved Constantine to attempt to co-opt the episcopal church rather than throw the future of his empire in with Mithras or Isis. The Cults of the Roman Empire is a must for students of christian origens. If they ignore the evidence contained in this volume, they will not fully appreciate some of the dynamic possessed by the victor.
Book Description
A study of the religious system of Mithraism, one of the 'mystery cults' popular in the Roman Empire contemporary with early Christianity. Roger Beck describes Mithraism from the point of view of the initiate engaging with the religion and its rich symbolic system in thought, word, ritual action, and cult life. He employs the methods of anthropology of religion and the new cognitive science of religion to explore in detail the semiotics of the Mysteries' astral symbolism, which has been the principal subject of his many previous publications on the cult.
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The Cult of Isis in the Roman Empire: Isis Invicta (Studies in Classics, V. 22)
Malcolm Drew Donalson
Manufacturer: Edwin Mellen Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
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Egypt
| Middle East
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ASIN: 0773468943 |
Book Description
This volume analyzes the priesthood of the provincial cult in every province of the Latin west where evidence has survived in the period from Augustus down to the mid third century.
Particular attention is paid to the epigraphic record, notably the Testimony of honorific statues especially at provincial centres, but discussion also focusses on the origin and background of provincial priests, their office and duties, and their careers both before and after holding provincial office.
Of special interest are the sixteen tables that list the main facts preserved by the epigraphic record, also a concluding overview that summarizes the principal features of the institution including the office of priestess and the role of administrative officials. Some fifty plates illustrate the text.
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Sage, Saint and Sophist: Holy Men and Their Associates in the Early Roman Empire
Graham Anderson
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Ancient
| History
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Rome
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Cults & Demonism
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ASIN: 0415023726 |
Book Description
Sage, Saint and Sophist explores the experience of holy men, both pagan and Christian, and the extent of their participation in the Roman Empire's religious climate which often wavered between faith and superstition. Graham Anderson discusses the atmosphere of belief in these centuries, grounding this issue in the context of Roman social history.
There has not been a general historical study of early imperial holy men of any kind since Bieler's portrait Theios Aner over half a century ago. Anderson applies techniques of literary and prosopographical analysis to bear on a varied cross-section of these figures from Jesus Christ to Peregrinus Proteus to Dio Chrysostom, and stresses their individuality as much as their common features. He examines the variety of services, real or imaginary, that holy men had to offer and the techniques they used to maintain their credibility. He discusses their career patterns, their techniques of revelation and persuasion, their relations with patrons, populace and one another; and the growth of cults of individuals.
Books:
- Fatigue Artist
- For America: Simple Things Each of Us Can Do to Make Our Country Better
- Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark
- In Another Place, Not Here
- In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (Yale Publications in the History of Art)
- Indulekha
- Jane Austen's Charlotte: Her Fragment of a Last Novel
- L'Immoraliste (Folio)
Books Index
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