"Vaccine" Mandate

A Life Of Sanctity

 

Peace

War

A Printed Book

The Auschwitz Memorial Statement On The Russia-Ukraine War

 

Definition: Empleomania

1984

Stories About Purgatory And What They Reveal: 30 Days For The Holy Souls compiled from Traditional Sources by An Ursuline Nun of Sligo, Ireland

Paperback: This book was written to impress upon its readers many truths about Purgatory. 

First, that it exists. 

Second, that the souls detained there suffer long and excruciating pains, and that they desperately need our prayers and sacrifices. 

Third, that we ourselves should strive mightily to avoid Purgatory. 

Stories About Purgatory And What They Reveal: 30 Days For The Holy Souls (2005) confirms in the reader's heart a healthy and holy respect for the sufferings endured by the Holy Souls, such that he will always remember them in his prayers. 

What You Don't Write That Gives What You Do Write Its Power

On The Line (Bill Smith and Lydia Chin Series) by S J Rozan

Hardback: Private Investigator Bill Smith is sent on a high-stakes chase when an electronically altered voice on his cell phone announces that Lydia Chin, his occasional partner, has been kidnapped. To keep Lydia alive, Smith will have to play - and win - an elaborate game of the kidnapper’s devising against impossible odds.

The first move sends him to an empty bar in Brooklyn where he finds the body of a small Chinese woman dressed like Lydia just as the building is surrounded by police. Now Smith is on the run from the police, suspected of murder, and in the worst trouble of his very troubled life.

Enlisting the help of Lydia’s hacker cousin Linus, and Linus’s cohort Trella, Smith has to stay one step ahead of the cops as he races against the clock in a game of wits with a sneering, shadowy psychopath. 

With few clues and no time to spare, Smith must uncover the secret behind the kidnapper’s identity and the reason he has come after Smith - and hope this will lead him to Lydia before it is too late.

On The Line (2010) is the tenth instalment in the gripping PIs Bill Smith and Lydia Chin series set in New York.

About the author: SJ Rozan, a native New Yorker, is the author of eighteen novels and six dozen short stories. Her work has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity awards for Best Novel and the Edgar for Best Short Story. She is also the recipient of the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award and recently received the Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. 

Bronx Noir, a short story anthology S J edited, was chosen NAIBA “Notable Book of the Year.” She also co-edited, with Jonathan Santlofer, the anthology Dark End of the Street. Spring 2022 will see Crime Hits Home, the Mystery Writers of America anthology, edited by S J.

SJ has served on the National Boards of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and is ex-President of the Private Eye Writers of America. She speaks, lectures and teaches, and she runs a summer writing workshop at the Art Workshop International in Assisi, Italy. In January 2003, SJ was an invited speaker at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The 2005 Left Coast Crime convention in El Paso, Texas made her its Guest of Honour and she was Toastmaster at Bouchercon 2009. A former architect in a practice that focused on police stations, firehouses, and zoos, S J Rozan lives in lower Manhattan.

Rating: 3/5

The Vanishing: The Twilight Of Christianity In The Land Of The Prophets by Janine di Giovanni

Hardback: The Vanishing (2021) reveals the plight and possible extinction of Christian communities across Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine after 2000 years in their historical homeland.

 

Some of the countries that first nurtured and characterized Christianity - along the North African Coast, on the Euphrates and across the Middle East and Arabia - are the ones in which it is likely to first go extinct. Christians are already vanishing. We are past the tipping point, now tilted toward the end of Christianity in its historical homeland. Christians have fled the lands where their prophets wandered, where Jesus Christ preached, where the great Doctors and hierarchs of the early church established the doctrinal norms that would last millennia.

 

From Syria to Egypt, the cities of northern Iraq to the Gaza Strip, ancient communities, the birthplaces of prophets and saints, are losing any living connection to the religion that once was such a characteristic feature of their social and cultural lives.

 

In The Vanishing, Janine di Giovanni has combined astonishing journalistic work to discover the last traces of small, hardy communities that have become wisely fearful of outsiders and where ancient rituals are quietly preserved amid 360 degree threats. Di Giovanni's riveting personal stories and her conception of faith and hope are intertwined throughout the chapters. The book is a unique act of pre-archeology: the last chance to visit the living religion before all that will be left are the stones of the past.

About the author: Janine di Giovanni has reported on war for 25 years. She has written seven books, including the critically acclaimed Madness Visible, The Place at the End of the World, and, most recently, a biography of the Magnum Photographer Eve Arnold. She is the Middle East Editor of Newsweek, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Granta and Harper’s among many others. A frequent foreign policy analyst on British, American and French television, she has won many awards including Granada Television’s Foreign Correspondent of the Year Award, the National Magazine Award, two Amnesty International Media Awards, and the Spear’s Memoir of the Year Award for Ghosts by Daylight. She is a Fred Pakis scholar in International Affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, has served as the president of the jury of the Prix Bayeux for war reporters and is a media leader at the World Economic Forum, Davos. She lives in Paris with her son. 

The Book Of All Books by Roberto Calasso

Hardback: The Book of All Books (2021) is a splendid reimagining of key stories from the Bible from the acclaimed author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

A man named Saul is sent to search for some lost donkeys and on the way is named king of his people. The queen of a remote African realm travels for three years with her multitudinous retinue to meet the king of Jerusalem and pose him a few riddles. A man named Abraham hears a divine voice speaking words that reverberate throughout the Bible: 'Go away from your land, from your kindred and from the house of your father toward the land that I will show you'.

In The Book of All Books, Roberto Calasso weaves together stories of promise and separation from one of the founding texts of Western civilisation. These tales of grace and guilt, of the chosen and the damned, cast many Biblical figures and indeed the whole book in a light as astonishing as it is disquieting.

The Book of All Books is part of a larger work which began with The Ruin of Kasch (1983) and includes The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka, and The Celestial Hunter.

About the author: Roberto Calasso was born in Florence in 1941. An author and publisher, he began working at Adelphi Edizioni from its founding in 1962 and continued as director for fifty years. The Book of All Books is the tenth part of a series that began with The Ruin of Kasch and includes the international bestseller The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony as well as Ka, K, Tiepolo Pink, La Folie Baudelaire, Ardor, The Celestial Hunter and The Unnamable Present. He died in Milan in 2021.

Rating: 2/5

The Joy And Light Bus Company (The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series) by Alexander McCall Smith

Hardback: Precious Ramotswe and Grace Makutsi, Gaborone's No 1 Lady Detectives, do not always agree on important issues - one being the complex male psyche. Grace believes that food is the source of men's happiness, while Precious takes a more nuanced view: men are not so different from women, they want to be loved and needed, too. It is pride that is so often their undoing.

Mma Ramotswe is reminded of this when her husband, J L B Matekoni, is offered a daunting business opportunity; one which, if it fails, threatens their existing livelihood, including the detective agency. Somehow, Precious must guide her husband to the right decision, while being mindful of how much he wants The Joy and Light Bus Company to succeed.

Meanwhile, there are other problems to solve. A wealthy client's elderly father has changed his will, making his devoted live-in nurse a significant beneficiary, and the ladies are tasked with uncovering the woman as a fraud. And then there is the disturbing rumoured maltreatment of children living and working on a local farm, which a concerned Mma Ramotswe is intent on investigating.

Professional and moral duty battles with female instinct and Mma Ramotswe is determined not to jump to conclusions until she has all the facts. She knows only too well how cunning people can be. After all, she herself is not beyond a little trickery - especially when it comes to righting wrongs and seeing justice served, or when innocent lives are at stake. All this and more in the twenty-second instalment of The Joy and Light Bus Company (2021).

The next and twenty-third instalment, A Song of Comfortable Chairs, will be released in September 2022.

About the author: Alexander McCall Smith, often referred to as ‘Sandy’, is one of the world’s most prolific and best-loved authors. His various series of books have been translated into forty-six languages and become bestsellers throughout the world. These include the highly successful The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the popular 44 Scotland Street novels, the Isabel Dalhousie novels, the von Igelfeld series and the new Detective Varg novels. He also writes stand-alone novels, children's fiction and libretti for short operas.

Alexander has received numerous awards for his writing and holds thirteen honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and North America.  He is Professor Emeritus of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. In 2007, he received a CBE for services to literature and in 2011 was honoured by the President of Botswana for services through literature to the country.  In 2015, he received the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and in 2017, The National Arts Club (of America) Medal of Honour for Achievement in Literature.

Rating: 5/5