Do you know Avaaz? Avaaz – meaning “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages – is a global web movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere. Avaaz empowers people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate…
As a tame introduction to the work of Jean Racine, this adaptation is most helpful, presenting the plays in abridged form and in contemporary English. Unfortunately, they thereby lose some of their claim to fame as “masterpieces of one of the greatest literary artists known”. Both plays follow the biblical narratives rather closely, while adding some…
Terri Nixon succeeds in combining the historic circumstances of village life in mid-seventeenth century Cornwall – blacksmiths, millers, peasants and squires, fishermen and pirates, all cringing under the peril of the fearful English Civil War – with glimpses of a parallel, supernatural world, whose inhabitants intervene and interact sporadically with that of the mortals they despise.
Did you know that Jesus experienced sexual temptation? See below. Down relates Jesus’s life chronologically, including almost all the details from the gospels and adding occasional human touches, such as His heart searching concerning His identity and mission, and that He had a friend near the Jordan at whose house He stayed several days. Such…
The premise of this book is intriguing: Ariel, a Jewish priestess and niece of King David, is sent on a mysterious quest by the angel Raziel. Not to a far-off country, but to a period a thousand years later, at the height of the Roman Empire, and shortly after the Crucifixion of the Jewish Messiah. The customs…
This is a very unusual book – both as regards the theme and the style. Two WWI soldiers experience the horrors of war, slaughtering mercilessly and seeing their comrades slaughtered. Each one finds himself alone in the most devastating conditions on a mountainside in the Romanian Carpathians. All of their respective companions have died –…
Isa and her young family emigrate from the tiny Orkney island of Raumsey to Alberta, where her parents are already living. An unfortunate young English girl, Sarah, happens to arrive at the same time, destined to marry a friend of her father’s, who is much older than she. The vastness of the prairie environment and…
This book, number 5 in the Raumsey series, not only portrays the horrors of WWII through the eyes of simple, ordinary participants, but sheds a sidelong glance at the morality of a war initiated at some high level, far away from those who are forced to carry it out without understanding why.
Eldredge has hit on something big! He dares to turn his back on the common modern Christian perspective on society (esp. masculine roles) and explore the deep, real motives and needs of men. His analysis is rather one-sided (e.g. every man carries a wound given by his father P.60) and so is his remedy: accept…
This is an amazing book, the first of the Century Trilogy. It is superbly researched and masterly written. We follow the events leading up to WWI through the eyes of several interrelated characters, from America, Great Britain, Germany and Russia.
Flame in the Night by Heather Munn is a captivating drama about the resistance movement in occupied France during WWII. Teenage scouts conceal Jewish children from the Gestapo in remote farms, attics, treetops and caves. Meanwhile, all around them everyday life continues as usual: cultivating vegetables, going to school, shovelling snow, attending church. Plot An…
Scandalous rumours and immoral men do their best to ruin May Rose Long’s life. But she strives to remain honest and chaste. With neither home nor money, she even adopts the forlorn wild teenager, Wanda, before realising she is her fugitive husband’s daughter. The book is well written and paints a realistic picture of the social…