Biography & Autobiography Book reviews and recommendations

"Pioneering American novelist James Fenimore Cooper lived from 1789 until 1851. In THE EARLY YEARS, Professor Wayne Franklin ends his biography when 36 year old Cooper boards a ship in 1826 to travel for the better part of a decade in Europe with his wife and five children. By 1826 James Cooper's best known novel THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS was in print. These and earlier works started his reputation at home and abroad. *** Author Franklin roots his narrative in documents, some not available until the 1990s. But he is not afraid to speculate. If, for instance, he knows that Cooper was in one city at the beginning of his honeymoon and knows when he arrives at Cooperstown but not by what overland route, he will guess and then use his guess as a starting point for describing landscapes more familiar to Cooper's bride Susan than to James himself. *** JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: THE EARLY YEARS is filled with often fascinating excursuses into the lives and times of seemingly every relative, schoolmate, naval officer colleague and acquaintance James Cooper (he added Fenimore later) ever had. Thus we see the impact that President Thomas Jefferson's embargo on trade with Britain had on the economy of New York State. We investigate the tenacious hold of dueling on officers of the young American navy. We learn how chance meetings with Indians or time spent in still Dutch-feeling Albany furnish materials for novels and Cooper's pioneering history of the U. S. Navy. *** The book has helpful contemporary black and white illustrations, lavish notes and an excellent bibliography. Wanting are maps of colonial and early American New York. All in all a book indispensable to lovers of James Fenimore Cooper and early American history. -OOO-"

"As a young journalist trying to establish his bona fides Schmidle chose to live in Pakistan for two years. He learned the native language and immersed himself in its culture. He describes the people, places, and events that he experienced in lyrical, almost poetical language. Despite the difficulty in following the unfamiliar Pakistani names of people, organizations, and cities, Schmidle takes the reader into the dynamics of life in this amazing country. Schmidle spent time visiting the hinterlands of Pakistan where factional groups are fighting each other, where tribal structure pits regions against each other and against the central government of the country, where antiAmerican sentiments dominate, and where Islamic extremism is persuasive to the people. He visited madrassas where young boys and girls are instructed and indoctrinatedin the Islamic faith; he became a confident of some we might consider terrorists; he talked with and witnessed the activities of Talabon fighters. While Schmidle makes great effort to be impartial in his reporting, he paints a picture of the Muscharef government, an ally of the United States, as a repressive regime that terrorized the people of Pakistan to hold onto power. Schmidle shows how ordinary Pakistanis view the Talibon as heroes who bring order and stability into ungoverned and lawless regions, but how their extremist religious views and cruel punishment of those who oppose them often turn the populace against them. TO LIVE OR TO PERISH will give you a different insight Pakistan and Afghanistan that will help you to make more informed judgment about American intervention in Afghanistan, how the people of the region perceive the world and particularly the West, and what we can expect from our efforts to bring democracy to those countries. It is a must-read for those who don't want to take for granted the standard media picture of American intervention in the Middle East, but rather want to make their own decisions about how we can best protect ourselves against the threat of global terrorism. "

" Dear Senator is well written and engaging. I have no doubt that Essie Mae did mpre to sensitize Strom Thurmond to the plight of African Americans than all of the congressional debates could've ever done! This book humanizes the complexities of being a southern segregationist whose political views and values were confronted due to the very real, intelligent and personal faces who were the brunt of the usual segregationists vitriole, ie, his only child for 66 years of his life and her mother, who he seemed to truly love. "

"Good story of a "feminist" who married and had a child. She still procuded along her eduational path and kept her marriage up. A difficult process at best. This is worth reading for all those who suffer or those to may not to see a day to day approach to this illness."

"Great book. Classic Updike: lush prose, piercing observations of both the physical world and the human psyche, great sex, and terribly interesting examinations of various religious impulses. A booklover's book!"

"this is a well written book for my history class, thank you"

"This book contains personal and in-depth interviews with sufferers of different forms of mental health illnesses including bi-polar disorder, psychosis, anxiety and schizophrenia to name a few. The interviews represent a voice for each of the illnesses explored and give a great insight to how individuals cope with everyday life. An amazing in-depth look into mental health and something that everybody should read - impossible to put down"

"This review is about Cardinal Avery Dulles and his 1946, 1996 book, A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE AND REFLECTIONS ON A THEOLOGICAL JOURNEY ISBN 10: 1556129041, ISBN 13: 9781556129049. *** Ten years ago my wife and I first read the now 90 year old American Cardinal, when we led adult education discussions in our parish community of Avery Dulles's best known work, MODELS OF THE CHURCH. Years went by until, throughout 2008, I immersed myself in Father Leonard Feeney, SJ and his "Boston Heresy Case" of 1948. This research soon led me to rediscover Cardinal Dulles, who, be it noted, is the son of Eisenhower's "brinksmanship" Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. For Avery Dulles (1918 - ), in early 1941 as a recent Harvard University graduate and convert to Roman Catholicism, co-founded the Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, MA which later became Father Feeney's launching pad for noisily and publicly reminding (not entirely unsuccessfully -- witness the growing body today of ultra-conservative Latin Mass Catholics)the people of Boston that all Catholics had been taught for centuries as dogma that "extra ecclesiam nulla salus": i. e., "outside the church there is no salvation." *** A naval officer in World War II, Avery Dulles spent time just after World War II working briefly but intensely and co-operatively with Father Feeney and associates before Dulles went off to a Jesuit novitiate. He always admired the radical priest, who would be excommunicated (not for heresy but for disobedience) by Pope Pius XII in 1953. Avery Dulles even wrote a powerful, appreciative eulogy of Feeney on his death in 1978, for years reconciled to Rome without having to retract a word of his narrow doctrine of no salvation for Protestants, unbaptized Jews, pagans and other non-Catholics. Dulles writes of Feeney and Saint Benedict Center in his 1946 spiritual memoir, reissued and updated in 1996 as A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE AND REFLECTIONS ON A THEOLOGICAL JOURNEY." *** For a brilliant, famous man and Roman Catholic cardinal, theologian Dulles is modest and unpretentious in both his voluminous writings and in his self-presentation in A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE. Deeper, I believe, than his modesty are Dulles's serenity and balance. He can love and honor a radical Roman Catholic schismatic like Leonard Feeney, present his views fairly and without passion and then politely disagree. Watch this style at work in A TESTIMONIAL TO GRACE as Protestant Dulles absorbs and synthesizes the world views of his Professors at Harvard, and of his much later partners in Lutheran-Catholic ecumenical give and take. Like Aristotle, Dulles is serene. Like another of his masters, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Dulles learns from everyone: from orthodox and heterodox, from conservative and liberal. These qualities cannot be missed in the warm, almost conversational pages of a now 90 year old Prince of the Church. He is now retired, feeble, but still keeping abreast of this world and trying his best to make his master, Jesus of Nazareth, speak to today's secular society in the contemporary language that it speaks and, Dulles argues, has every right to expect to be spoken to in. -OOO-"