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Father Columba rides again This time he is on leave from his abbey
in Pennsylvania to do a retreat on the Holy Isle of Iona, just off
the west coast of Scotland. It is the tiny dot in the ocean where
his namesake, Saint Columba, took refuge and built an abbey over a
millennium and a half ago. While there, the new Columba is called
upon to solve a murder mystery and unknowingly follows in the
footsteps of his predecessor, who had to solve a similar mystery in
the distant but not so misty past. At the turn of this millennium,
in 2001, author James Baker discovered a journal in the archives of
Columba's abbey in Pennsylvania which detailed Columba's dithering
attempt to solve a murder in a priory in Mississippi. That account
is now the book Prior Knowledge. Five years later he discovered a
second journal, which comprises half of Good for the Soul, in the
Vatican Library in Rome. He learned the story of the first Columba
from an Irish priest studying at Rome's Angelicum Institute. Seeing
the striking similarities in the two stories, he combined them for
this book. The priest hinted several times that he knew about
another of Columba's journals concerning a murder in Rome, but
Baker has not been able to track it down. Still another journal,
the story of a murder in Korea which Columba helped solve and which
he mentioned in the "Good for the Soul" journal, is missing. It is
possible that Columba destroyed it because it was dangerous. Only
last year Baker's collaborator Cheryl Greer Reels found another of
Columba's journals in Nashville's Convent of St. Mary Magdalene.
This journal will eventually be published in book form. Look for
it.
This changes everything we thought we knew about John Steinbeck.
After languishing in the CIA's archives for 60 years, a letter is
uncovered in John Steinbeck's own hand that shatters everything
history tells us about the author's life. Written in 1952, to CIA
Director Walter Bedell Smith, Steinbeck makes an offer to become an
asset for the Agency during a trip to Europe later that year. More
shocking than Steinbeck's letter is Smith's reply accepting John's
proposal. Discovered by author Brian Kannard, these letters create
the tantalizing proposal that John Steinbeck was, in fact, a CIA
spy. Utilizing information from Steinbeck's FBI file, John's own
correspondence, and interviews with John's son Thomas Steinbeck,
playwright Edward Albee, a former CIA intelligence officer, and
others, Steinbeck: Citizen Spy uncovers the secret life of American
cultural icon and Nobel Prize-winner, John Steinbeck. Did Steinbeck
actively gather information for the intelligence community during
his 1947 and 1963 trips to the Soviet Union? Why was the
controversial author of The Grapes of Wrath never called before the
House Select Committee on Un-American Activities, despite alleged
ties to Communist organizations? Did the CIA influence Steinbeck to
produce Cold War propaganda as part of Operation MOCKINGBIRD? Why
did the CIA admit to the Church Committee in 1975 that Steinbeck
was a subject of their illegal mail-opening program known as
HTLINGUAL? These and a host of other resources leave little doubt
that there are depths yet unplumbed in the life of one of America's
most treasured authors. Just how heavily was Steinbeck involved in
CIA operations? What did he know? And how much did he sacrifice for
his country? Steinbeck: Citizen Spy brings us one step closer to
the truth. This text includes a note in the introduction from
Thomas Steinbeck.
The story of Toussaint Louverture and the tragic nation of Haiti
that he founded has never been told with such power and imagination
as respected historian and master story teller James Baker does in
his novel "Sex and Bondage in Three Colors." In this revolutionary
book he has created a new literary genre, one critics have called
"historical fantasy." History limits itself to known facts.
Historical fiction limits itself to creating scenes and dialogue
only in places where facts are not known and only if the created
scenes and dialogue do not violate known facts. Baker's historical
fantasy tells a story of historical figures without limits, setting
his fantasy free to soar. This novel ranges over the interconnected
lives of such men as Toussaint, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Thomas
Jefferson and demonstrates how their distinct and often conflicting
visions of the future collide. He describes in delicious detail the
sexual exploits, many of them with disastrous results, of white,
black, and brown men who break free of their bonds only to be
shackled by their desires. There is rape, incest, miscegenation,
and unbridled lust as a host of men and women conceive and give
birth to our cruel modern world.
"Prior Knowledge," what a great story, religion, sex, and murder
all in one volume. Master story teller James Baker here follows the
wild excursion of the aging Benedictine monk Father Columba as he
is called out of retirement to reform a troubled priory and ends up
becoming a sleuth. Upon arriving at his new post, a priory
commissioned to train "belated vocations" for the priesthood, he
learns that his predecessor has mysteriously disappeared; and
before he can solve that puzzle he finds himself in the middle of a
bloody murder. Someone has killed a seminarian Getting to the
bottom of this crime will require all his theological training,
some trial and error good luck, and of course prior knowledge. As
he probes the varied and sundry secrets of his monks and
seminarians, he discovers for the first time the many facets of
love and hate. At age 65 he himself finds the kind of love he long
ago promised never to experience: sex with a young Chinese American
newspaper woman. Join Father Columba in his quest for
truth--religious, legal, sexual--which just could all be cut from
the same holy cloth.
"The darkest hour is just before dawn." An old adage, a true
statement. In "Faith for a Dark Saturday," the noted theologian and
historian James Baker shows how nine men from the Bible prove the
point. Each man tells, in his own words, the misery of his darkest
hour, a time that he did not know but we do was just before the
dawning of a morning of hope. There is Abraham as he prepared to
sacrifice his son Isaac; Jacob as he prepared to meet his hostile
brother and possible death; Moses in desert exile before he sees
the burning bush and receives the commission of his life; King
Hezekiah as he awaits assault from the invincible Assyrian army;
Joseph as he contemplates the scandal caused by his finance's
pregnancy, the apostle Peter on the Saturday between the
crucifixion and resurrection; Paul as he prepares to leave for
Damascus to round up Christians; the jailer of Philippi before the
earthquake that will bring his salvation; and John in exile on
Patmos before his vision. You will be inspired to lean on your own
faith as you share the experiences of these men, caught in fear and
despair, during the agony of their dark Saturdays, just before the
dawn of a new day of hope.
"Peter Peacock Passes" proves the commonly held perception that for
Preachers the pursuit of God and Sex are twin obsessions. Master
story teller James Baker has captured with the most vivid prose the
pitfalls and pratfalls of a young Texan who feels equally the
desire to fulfill his Divine Vocation and his Natural Urge to find
a mate. In his quest Petie Peacock struggles to survive the
seductions of a college beauty queen, a delectable farmer's
daughter, a high school cheerleader with Italianate mammary
endowments, and a strange pair of twins named Golda and Silvia
before at last he finds his Mary Sontag. He participates in the
annihilation of a Homecoming float, pranks that result in blood,
and the destruction of a prominent Baptist minister when
pornographic pictures end up in his slide show of the Holy Land. He
is humiliated in Indiana, abandoned in Chicago, and deluged in
Texas before he discovers in his tumescence a way to face this
brave new world. Share the fun.
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