Repression

 

A Deadly Secret: The Bizarre and Chilling Story Of Robert Durst (True Crime) by Matt Birkbeck

Paperback: Even as he awaits trial, accused murderer Robert Durst cannot seem to stay out of the headlines. The subject of the HBO documentary The Jinx and the upcoming Lifetime movie, The Lost Wife of Robert Durst, his story is as captivating as it is horrifying.

Here, from the first reporter to access Durst’s NYPD files, is the authoritative account of a decades-long criminal odyssey - the very book found in Durst’s own apartment when it was searched by police.

 

When medical student Kathie Durst vanished in 1982, she was married to Robert Durst, son of a New York real estate magnate. Kathie’s friends had reason to implicate her husband. They told police that Kathie lived in terror of Robert, and that she had uncovered incriminating financial evidence about him. But Durst’s secrets went even deeper. For decades, Kathie’s disappearance remained a mystery.

Then in 2001, Durst, an heir to an empire valued at two billion dollars, was arrested for shoplifting in Pennsylvania. When the police brought him in, they discovered that he was a suspect in the murder of Texas drifter Morris Black, whose dismembered remains were found floating in Galveston Bay, and that Durst was also wanted for questioning in the killing of his friend, Susan Burman, in Los Angeles.

Based on interviews with family, friends, and acquaintances of Durst, law enforcement, and others involved in the case, A Deadly Secret is a cross-country odyssey of stolen IDs and multiple identities that raises baffling questions about one of the country’s most prominent families—and one of its most elusive suspected killers.

 

A Deadly Secret (2005) includes additional material not in the original Berkley edition and eight pages of photographs.

About the author: Matt Birkbeck is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of A Deadly Secret: The Strange Disappearance of Kathie Durst, The Quiet Don, Deconstructing Sammy and A Beautiful Child. His work has appeared in Reader’s Digest, People magazine, Playboy, Rolling Stone, the New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has appeared on a variety of network and cable news programs, including CNN, ABC's 20/20, NBC, CBS and Investigation Discovery, among others, and was celebrated by the New York Times Book Review for his "killer leads, gripping kickers, and sensational descriptions." 

A People Library

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Paperback: All animals are equal - but some are more equal than others.

When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control.

Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another.

'It is the history of a revolution that went wrong - and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for the perversion of the original doctrine,' wrote Orwell for the first edition of Animal Farm in 1945.

Orwell wrote the novel at the end of 1943, but it almost remained unpublished; its savage attack on Stalin, at that time Britain's ally, led to the book being refused by publisher after publisher. Orwell's simple, tragic fable has since become a world-famous classic.

You can find many of the sites that inspired the works of George Orwell on a modern map, including the original inspiration for Animal Farm nestling up a quiet East Sussex road. These days known primarily for his disturbing and influential dystopian works, most notably 1984, Orwell was best regarded for most of his career as a journalist and critic and his fiction and many essays, are equally rooted in a very real-world view.

Well-travelled Orwell’s writing draws from a life of wide experience, from times of abject poverty living as a tramp on the streets of London, to exploring social deprivation in northern England, to mingling with political elite and fighting in the Spanish Civil War explored in works including Down and Out in Paris and London, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.

Animal Farm was an anti-Soviet satire in a pastoral setting featuring two pigs as its main protagonists. These pigs were said to represent Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. The novel brought Orwell great acclaim and financial rewards.

About the author: George Orwell (1903-1950) was a novelist, essayist and critic best known for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and communism. Orwell died of tuberculosis in a London hospital on 21 January 1950. Although he was just 46 years old at the time of his death, his ideas and opinions have lived on through his work.

Despite Orwell’s disdain for the BBC during his life, a statue of the writer was commissioned by artist Martin Jennings and installed outside the BBC in London. The eight-foot bronze statue, paid for by the George Orwell Memorial Fund, was unveiled in November 2017. An inscription reads, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." 

Herta Müller (b1953), Romanian-born German Novelist, Poet and Essayist

 

I Dare You

 

Seen In Covent Garden, London

 

Padre Pio Of Pietrelcina: Everybody's Cyrenean by Alessandro of Ripabottoni

Paperback: See what fame he had! What a world-wide clientele gathered around him! But why? Was it because he was a philosopher, because he was a learned man, because he was a man of means? It was because he said Mass humbly, because he confessed from morning to evening; and because, difficult as it is to say, he was a marked representative of the Lord. - Pope Paul VI, 20 February 1971

This edition is edited by Fr Francesco D Colacelli and printed by Leone Arti Grafiche SRLS-Foggia in May 2016. 

Its original title is San Pio da Pietrelcina: Cireneo di tutti and is translated from the Italian by Geraldine Nolan. 

It was purchased in the town of San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy. 

About the author: Alessandro of Ripabottoni, a capuchin friar of the religious province "Sant'Angelo and Padre Pio" (in the world Raffaele Cristofaro), was born in Ripabottoni on 5 January 1920 and he died a Campobasso on 15 November 2002. 

After he was vested in the habit of St Francis in 1937, the following year, he made his simple vows and in 1941, he took his perpetual vows. He was ordained priest on 17 February 1946 at Campobasso and he continued his studies until 1955, when he obtained his doctorate in Canon Law from the Gregorian university in Rome. He is considered one of the best historian of the capuchin religious province. His research and studies on Padre Pio, as well as having been fundamental for the process of beatification and canonisation, have been translated in many languages. The most important work being Padre Pio's, Letters that consists of four volumes of letters sent and received by Padre Pio, and edited by Fr Alessandro of Ripabottoni and Fr Melchiorre of Pobladura. 

Other books written by him are Padre Pio Recounts (only in Italian), Many Have Written Of Him, a bibliography on Padre Pio of Pietrelcina (only in Italian) and Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, a biographical profile. The present volume is the synthesis of a larger work with a similar title: Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, Everybody's Cyrenean (980 pages, only in Italian and no longer in print). 

John Chrysostom's Homilies On Marriage And Family Life

Paperback and About the author: St John Chrysostom (347 - 407), was one of the most important Early Church Fathers, who served first as priest in Antioch and then as Archbishop of Constantinople. He is known for his sharp preaching, and his denunciation of the moral shortcomings of authority in the church and the state, which ultimate led to his untimely death. He is also famous for the Liturgy used by the Eastern Orthodox church in almost every service, which bears his name: the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom. 

His epithet Chrysostom means "golden-mouthed" in Greek and denotes his famous eloquence for which people would flock to hear him. Chrysostom was an extremely prolific author, exceeded only by St Augustine of Hippo in the quantity of his surviving writings. He is held in great honour as a saint in the Orthodox and Catholic world. 

The Eastern Orthodox church regards him as one of the Three Holy Hierarchs (alongside Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus). As such it is fascinating to hear the great master of preaching expound upon marriage and family life, a particularly controversial subject as the roles of men and women having been changing in modern society. 

The four homilies presented here are expositions on the following scriptures: 1) 1 Cor. vii. 1 - 36, 2) Ephesians v. 22-35, 3) Ephesians vi. 1-4, and 4) Colossians 3:18-25. They are taken from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volumes 13 and 14 and edited by Philip Schaff (1819-1893). 

This edition is published in 2021. 

Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attacks And The Paranormal by Richard Gallagher MD

Hardback: The world’s leading psychiatric authority on demonic possession delves into the hidden world of exorcisms and his own transformation from cynic to believer over the course of his twenty-five-year career in his debut, Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attacks And The Paranormal (2020).

Successful New York psychiatrist Richard Gallagher was skeptical yet intrigued when a hard-nosed, no-nonsense Catholic priest asked him to examine a woman for a possible exorcism. Meeting her, Gallagher was astonished. The woman’s behaviour defied logic. In an instant, she could pinpoint a person’s secret weaknesses. She knew how individuals she’d never known had died, including Gallagher’s own mother, who passed away after a lengthy battle with ovarian cancer. She spoke fluently in multiple languages, including Latin - but only when she was in a trance.

This was not psychosis, Gallagher concluded. It was, in his scientific estimation, what could only be describe as paranormal ability. The woman wasn’t mentally disturbed - she was possessed. This remarkable case was the first of many that Gallagher would encounter. Sought after today by leaders of all faiths—ministers, priests, rabbis and imams, Gallagher has spent a quarter-century studying demonic activity and exorcisms throughout history and has witnessed more cases than any other psychiatrist in the world today.

In this eerie and enthralling book, Gallagher chronicles his most famous cases for the first time, including:

A professional who claimed her spiritualist mother had “assigned” her a spirit who “turned on her.”

A petite woman - ”90 pounds soaking wet” - who threw a 200-pound Lutheran deacon across the room to the horror of onlookers in a church hall;

And “Julia,” the so-called Satanic queen and self-described witch, who exhibited “the most harrowing” case, a “once-in-a-century” possession.

Going beyond horror movies and novels, Demonic Foes (2020) takes you deep into this hidden world, sharing in full details of these true-life tales of demonic possession.

About the author: Richard Gallagher, MD, a board-certified psychiatrist, is a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical and a psychoanalyst on the faculty of Columbia University. He graduated from Princeton University, Phi Beta Kappa in classics, and trained as a resident in psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. The world’s foremost scientific expert on the subject of diabolic attacks, he has been an active member of the International Association of Exorcists since the 1990s. He lives in Westchester, New York.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), English Writer

 

Life In A Jewish Family: Edith Stein: An Autobiography 1891-1916 (The Collected Works Volume 1) by Edith Stein

Paperback: This initial volume of the Collected Works of Edith Stein offers, for the first time in English, the unabridged biography of Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), depicting her life as a child and young adult. Her text ends abruptly because the Nazi SS arrested, then deported, her to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942.

Edith Stein is one of the most significant German-Jewish women of the 20th century. At the age of twenty-five, she became the first assistant to Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology. She was much in demand as a writer and lecturer after she converted to Catholicism. 

Later, as a Discalced Carmelite nun, she maintained her intellectual pursuits until, together with millions of others, she became a victim of Nazi persecution across Europe.

This landmark work makes available in English an eyewitness account of persons and activities on the scene at the time when psychology and philosophy became separate disciplines.

In addition to photographs and a map, this volume is enhanced with a preface, the foreword and afterword, notes, and a list of places associated with Edith Stein's life. These features, together with Edith Stein's text, bring into relief the many background details of the rich autobiographical work she has left us.

Life In A Jewish Family (1986, 2016) is translated from the German by Sister Josephine Koeppel of St Teresa, OCD.

About the author: Edith Stein (12 October 1891 - 9 August 1942) was a German philosopher, a Carmelite nun, martyr, and saint of the Catholic Church, who died at Auschwitz because she was also a Jew. She converted to Christianity in 1922 and was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. After a career of teaching and writing in Speyer, Germany, she gained a reputation as a leading thinker on Catholic women's issues. In 1933 she attempted unsuccessfully to influence Pope Pius XI to speak out against the campaign of Nazi hatred against the Jews.

After the Nazi anti-semitic legislation forced her to resign from her teaching post, she was received into the Discalced Carmelite Order in 1934. As the Nazi campaign against the Jews intensified, she was secretly transferred to a convent in the Netherlands. Then, when the Nazis captured Holland, the Dutch Catholic Church denounced Nazi racism, and the Nazi regime reacted by ordering the arrest of all Catholics in Holland of Jewish descent, who had earlier been exempt from persecution. Stein was sent to Auschwitz and died with her fellow Jews on 9 August 1942. She was canonized as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (her Carmelite monastic name) by Pope John Paul II in 1998. However, she is often referred to simply as "Saint Edith Stein."

About the translator: Sister Josephine was born Ida Klara Koeppel in Widnau, Canton St Gallen, Switzerland on 24 March 1921. She came to Lebanon, PA in 1928 because her biological father Franz (Frank) Koeppel was employed there as an embroiderer (he had immigrated in 1921, leaving his wife Emma (Frei) and 3 children behind).

Klara graduated from Lebanon Catholic High School in 1939 and after working in several jobs, joined the Carmelite Order of Loretto, PA, in April 1948, with First Profession on October 15, 1952. She helped form the Carmelite Monastery of the Sacred Heart and of the Holy Face in 1953, which moved to Elysburg, PA in 1961, where Sister Josephine stayed the majority of her life.

Sister Josephine received her BA from King’s College on 19 March 1994 and her Master of Christian Spirituality from Creighton University on 12 August 1994. She studied Edith Stein for 56 years (1952-2008) translating three of Edith Stein’s books from German to English, and writing three biographies of Stein.

Sister Josephine passed away on 10 September 2011.

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

Paperback: Apples Never Fall (2021) is a deliciously sinister thriller from the masterly pen of Liane Moriarty. Apples Never Fall looks at marriage, siblings, and how the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest. 

The Delaney family love one another dearly - it's just that sometimes they want to murder each other.

The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They are killers on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after fifty years of marriage, they have finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. 

So why are Stan and Joy so miserable?

The four Delaney children - Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke - were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that’s okay, now that they are all successful grown-ups and there is the wonderful possibility of grandchildren on the horizon.

One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door, bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend. The Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted.

Later, when Joy goes missing, and Savannah is nowhere to be found, the police question the one person who remains: Stan. 

But for someone who claims to be innocent, he, like many spouses, seems to have a lot to hide. Two of the Delaney children think their father is innocent, two are not so sure - but as the two sides square off against each other in perhaps their biggest match ever, all of the Delaneys will start to reexamine their shared family history in a very new light.

Apples Never Fall is the brand new novel from the worldwide No 1 bestselling author of Nine Perfect Strangers and the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning HBO series Big Little Lies.

About the author: Liane Moriarty is the bestselling author of nine novels, including The Hypnotist's Love Story, The Husband's Secret, Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers. Her novels have sold more than twenty million copies worldwide and been translated into over forty languages. Big Little Lies is now an Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning HBO series, produced by and starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon. Nine Perfect Strangers has been adapted for TV, starring Nicole Kidman and Melissa McCarthy. Liane lives in Sydney with her husband, son and daughter.

Rating: 5/5 

Bro, She Can Read

 

LYING

 

St Rose of Lima: Patroness Of The Americas by Sister Mary Alphonsus O.SS.R

Paperback: St Rose of Lima (1586-1617), Patroness of the Americas, is the first canonized saint of the New World. She was the tenth of thirteen children. Though exquisitely beautiful (hence her nickname, Rose), she refused to marry, and while helping support her family by needlework and growing flowers, she practiced heroic charity and lived as a Dominican Tertiary in her parents' home. Rose tenderly cared for the sick, even those with repulsive wounds, and she often obtained miraculous cures for people from the Child Jesus.

On other occasions, Rose worked miracles in order to feed the members of her family, and became known as "Mother of the Poor." Rose continually prayed and offered her sufferings for the conversion of the idolatrous Incas. 

In the year 1615, through her prayers, the Blessed Sacrament and the people of Lima were spared attack by savage pirates. 

St Rose was a friend and confidant of St Martin de Porres, who lived in the same city. Her mystical experiences caused an ecclesiastical inquiry. 

Though dead at only 31, St Rose's love of God was so intense that she was recognized as a saint in her own time and was canonized by the Church just 54 years later, in 1671. St Rose of Lima has captured the imagination of the world and stands as one of the most popular saints in the history of the Church.

About the author: Sister Mary Alphonsus O.SS.R was a nun and author of the twentieth century. Her biography of St Rose of Lima: Patroness of the Americas relates the tale of a humble, young, poor girl who gave her life to God rather than to the many suitors who eagerly pursued her. Sister Alphonsus' work was originally published in 1968 by the B Herder Book Company, receiving the Imprimatur upon publication. It was also printed by TAN in 2010. This edition is printed in 1982 by TAN Books.

Mum & Dad by Joanna Trollope

Paperback: 'Oh I care. I care all right. It's more that dealing with the situation and all these different personalities and what is and isn't acceptable is often just too much for me. If Mum listened to me ever, it would be a different matter. But she doesn't. She only listens to Jake and there's nothing I can do about that, so I've stopped even trying. I try to stop minding, too, although I'm not very successful. So despite the fact that I know you think I'm wet and useless and defeatist, I'm actually just trying to elude being stamped on by everyone else, flattened, obliterated. It may sound pathetic to you, but I just want people to be kind. Kind to me, and to each other. That's all.'

Mum & Dad (2020) is a heartwarming family drama from number one bestseller Joanna Trollope, with all her trademark wit and wisdom.

What happens when family roles are reversed and the children must look after mum and dad?

It has been twenty-five years since Gus and Monica left England to start a new life in Spain, building a wine business from the ground up. However, when Gus suffers a stroke and their idyllic Mediterranean life is thrown into upheaval, it is left to their three grown-up children in London to step in.

As the children descend on the vineyard, it becomes clear that each has their own idea of how best to handle their mum and dad, as well as the family business. But as long-simmering resentments rise to the surface and tensions reach breaking point, can the family ties prove strong enough to keep them together?

Written with Trollope’s keen eye for all-too-human foibles, Mum and Dad puts a bittersweet generational power grab under a compassionate spotlight.

Mum & Dad is Joanna Trollope's twenty-second novel.

About the author: Joanna Trollope is the author of many highly acclaimed and bestselling novels, including The Rector's Wife, Marrying the Mistress and Daughters in Law. She was appointed OBE in 1996 and CBE in 2019, a trustee of the National Literacy Trust in 2012, and a trustee of the Royal Literary Fund in 2016. She has chaired the Whitbread and Orange Awards, as well as being a judge of many other literature prizes including chairing the BBC National Short Story Awards for 2017. She has been part of two DCMS panels on public libraries and is patron of numerous charities, including Meningitis Now and Chawton House Library. In 2014, she updated Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility as the opening novel in the Austen Project. 

Rating: 5/5

Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), English Poet

 

Affirmation

The Kind Of September