Book Description
Daily reflections on Saints, Prophets, and witnesses for our time.
Customer Reviews:
Let The Buyer Understand . . . .......2007-05-14
. . . what this book is, and more importantly, what this book is not.
The book IS a collection of brief biographies of inspirational and prophetic persons throughout the ages, presented in a "saint of the day" format. (As another reviewer has pointed out, many of the persons presented are done so on their "official" feast day.)
The book is NOT an exclusive collection of Catholic (or Orthodox or Anglican) saints; nor is it limited even to Christians. The buyer needs to be aware of this fact prior to purchase, as this will undoubtedly turn off some potential readers -- and, most likely, pique the interest of others. If a buyer is looking for a "Lives of the Saints" in the strict, ecclesial sense of the word, this is not what you are looking for.
Some readers may also be put off by the rather obvious left-wing bias of the author evident both in some of the individuals chosen for mention -- and, frankly, in a certain amount of historical revisionism. (I read the entry for "Heloise" today, and as a professional historian, absolutely cringed.)
This is not to say, however, that the book is without value. Indeed, it is an eye-opening read, especially for those unfamiliar with some of the great spiritual and philosophical minds outside the realm of Christianity. There's a great deal of brilliance out there!
Just know what you're purchasing.
Wonderful compendium.......2007-03-08
I have taken to reading the life described for each day of the year as my inspiration morning reading. A wonderfully inclusive broadly based choice of prophets and witnesses for our time, not forgetting those formally canonized, who qualify as speaking to us now.
A wonderful daily resource for hope.......2006-08-02
This is one of our favorite books. We pray from it daily. It has been a wonderful resource. I was asked to give a morning retreat based on hope. I used this book as the basis for the prayer. Our hope resides in one another as we seek God in our daily lives. The saints,the prophets and witnesses in Ellsberg's book are living examples of this simple truth.
Saint Carlos....November 4th.......2006-04-12
I beautiful book..! I could not find Saint Carlos, though, traditionally on November the 4th.
The best Saints Lives I Have Ever Encountered.......2006-02-26
I have been using Mr. Ellsberg's book for several years in my weekday sermons. It is light years away from the old standard Lives of the Saints. The biographies are insightful, well-researched and by far the best that is out there right now. I have given it as a gift to many friends.
Book Description
From the bestselling author of All Saints comes this new collection of devotional sketches on history's greatest women. From Joan of Arc to Anne Frank to Mary Magdalene, Ellsberg offers insights into the way that women of all faiths and backgrounds have lived out the lives of sanctity, mysticism, social justice, and world reform. Blessed Among All Women features new material along with the best women saints of All Saints, for over 120 inspirational readings
Customer Reviews:
A wonderful and inspirational collection.......2007-09-13
Robert Ellsberg has another extraordinary book here. As with "The Saints' Guide to Happiness" and "All Saints," he has done obviously extensive research in learning of well- and not-so-well-known people who have heard how God was prompting them to a mission. This time, the spotlighted people are women who discerned that prompting and the book tells how they moved forward with it.
Ellsberg has a marvelous gift of taking the details of rarely wonderful lives and compacting those details while also making them totally readable, fascinaing and inspiring. The women about whose lives he has written are remarkable.
No matter what your gender, if you are looking for spiritual inspiration, this book is well worth considering.
Women Count More than Given Credit.......2007-02-07
This is a superb book dealing with women who might well be forgotten.
The author has emphasized their heroism wihtout bravado.
He has also presented their spirituality without being sacharine.
A very good read. Highly recommended especially for the macho class.
Holy women, prophetic women, REAL women.......2006-01-27
If you're like me, your childhood was saturated by mawkish tales of holier-than-life saints who were always going around suffering martyrdom with eyes piously turned heavenward. The sheer unreality of such stories inhibited me from taking saints seriously until Robert Ellsberg's 1997 book _All Saints_ awakened me to the fact that saints, both "official" and "unofficial," are ordinary people who manage to love kindness, do justice, and walk humbly with God in extraordinary ways. They're not other-worldly fictions. They're brothers and sisters whose examples help awaken us to our own sainthood.
In his new _Blessed Among All Women_ Ellsberg continues his exploration by offering nearly 150 new vignettes of women saints (again, "official" as well as "unofficial") who have been touched by God and whose witnesses in turn touch us. The vignettes are organized into eight sections that correspond not only to the eight Beatitudes, but also to different approaches to God: contemplative enclosure, gospel-based activism, penitence, mysticism, artistic creativity, and so on. Some of the women Ellsberg writes about are traditional figures: Clare of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena. Others are less conventional but totally deserving of our consideration: the four girls martyred in 1963 at the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the "witches" of Salem, and Karla Faye Tucker, executed by the state of Texas in 1998.
Ellsberg's treatment of the saints in _Blessed_ is loving and insightful, with no hint of false piety or sentimentalism. Moreover, he's sensitive to the fact that the spiritual journeys of women saints are often complicated by cultural assumptions about gender, and that many were (and are) persecuted because their fierce devotion to God led them down paths that violated conventional gender norms (the Beguine saints are tragic examples of this) as well as conventional religious sensibilities.
All in all, a fantastically inspiring, thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.
Learning from, learning to be saints.......2005-12-07
Blessed among women is the latest volume from the finest interpreter of holiness in life we have, Robert Ellsberg. He has edited the writings and written about such living icons of our time as Dorothy Day, Charles deFoucauld, Carlo Caretto, to note but a few. His award-winning volume, All Saints, gave us a porrtrait of a holy man or woman each day for a year from across the centuries and the communities of faith. It remains one of the best gifts for spiritual reading for any occasion. In The Saints' Guide to Happiness he dug deeply into the holy life: the tools of sanctity, the struggles, questions, the ways in which people have lived a godly life. I have used this with great profit in my undergradute courses. Now, Blessed Among All Women takes us into the personalities, the lives, the accomplishments of holy women all too often overlooked and ignored. Using the Beatitudes as a framework he presents to us remarkable but not always familiar women of valor such as poet and Carmelite Jessica Powers, martyr of the concentartion camps and writer Etty Hillesum, theologian and mystic Adrienne von Speyer and social activist Cornelia Connelly, among dozens more martyrs, prophets, teachers, and reformers. This is but one more gift to our spiritual lives, for our spiritual reading and most of all to our imitation.
Fr. Michael Plekon, priest in the Orthodox Church in America, Professor, City University of New York, Baruch College, Sociology/Anthropology, Program in Religion & Culture
Book Description
"Everything in the world must be shown and people around the world must have an idea of what's happening to the other people around the world. I believe this is a function of the vector that the documentary photographer must have, to show one person's existence to another."—Sebastião Salgado
Illustrated with a compelling image from each photographer, Witness in Our Time traces the recent history of social documentary photography in the words of twenty-two of the genre's best photographers, editors, and curators, showing that the profession remains vital, innovative, and committed to social change. Featuring interviews with Hansel Mieth, Walter Rosenblum, Michelle Vignes, Wayne Miller, Peter Magubane, Matt Herron, Jill Freedman, Mary Ellen Mark, Earl Dotter, Eugene Richards, Susan Meiselas, Sebastião Salgado, Graciela Iturbide, Antonin Kratochvil, Donna Ferrato, Joseph Rodriguez, Dayanita Singh, Fazal Sheikh, Gifford Hampshire, Peter Howe, Colin Jacobson, and Ann Wilkes Tucker
Customer Reviews:
Brief.......2003-02-26
Covers many famous photojournalists but each coverage is very light and the details are not interesting enough.
I need a new copy.......2001-07-21
This will be the second time I'm buying this book. I've lent it out to one of my staff and somewhere down the line it's disappeared. I think that's says a lot about this book. It's nice to have around to read through on a Saturday morning with a mug of coffee or flip through for inspiration.
It has definitely helped not only the way I see the world, but with my own photography.
Exploring the views/mindsets of prominent photojournalists.......2001-06-24
This is a great book. If you are at all interested in documentary photography/photojournalism, then you will not be able to put this book down!
It is jam-packed with a collection of personal essays by the worlds most prominent documentary photographers. They speak about why and how they do what they do, their path in life and their experiences seeing the world up close and personal.
The book has at least one black and white image example per photographer, but it's not a coffee table photography book. It's a relatively small size and can be carried with you in a bag quite easily.
I'm going to go back and read this book again. It is full of reasonings and inspirations and as a published photographer, it makes me want to grab my Leica and hit the streets with some black and white film...
A Unique and Valuable Resource.......2000-10-25
Witness in Our Time gives readers a rare glimpse into the minds of some of the most talented contemporary documentary photographer. Editor Ken Light offers a valuable resource to any professional or student photographer, or anyone with an interest in documentary photography. Witness in Our Time provides personal accounts by photographers such as Sebastião Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark and Eugene Richards of how each has made it in the challenging field of documentary photography. Witness in Our Time offers an inspirational and sometimes sobering view of the past, present and future of this important field.
Average customer rating:
- The power of accusation
- Take two grains of salt and call me in the morning
- A Distressing Tale of Injustice
- Absolutely chilling
- Questionable Research
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No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times (Wall Street Journal Book)
Dorothy Rabinowitz
Manufacturer: Free Press
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0743228405 |
Book Description
In No Crueler Tyrannies, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz re-frames the facts, reconsiders the evidence, and demystifies the proceedings of some of America's most harrowing cases of failed justice. Recalling the hysteria that accompanied the child sex-abuse witch-hunts of the 1980s and 1990s, Rabinowitz's investigative study brings to life such alarming examples of prosecutorial terrors as the case against New Jersey nursery school worker Kelly Michaels, absurdly accused of 280 counts of sexual assault; the as-yet-unfinished story of Gerald Amirault's involvement in the Fells Acres scandal; Patrick Griffin, a respected physician whose life and reputation were destroyed by one false accusation of molestation; and Miami policeman Grant Snowden's sentencing of five consecutive life terms for a crime that, as proved in court eleven years later, he did not commit.
By turns a shocking exposé, a much-needed postmortem, and a required-reading assignment for prosecutors and judges alike, No Crueler Tyrannies is ultimately an inspiring book about the courage of ordinary citizens who believe in the American judicial system enough to fight for due process.
Download Description
"In 1742, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, wrote, ""There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."" Two hundred forty-three years later, in 1985, Dorothy Rabinowitz, a syndicated columnist and television commentator, encountered the case of a New Jersey day care worker named Kelly Michaels, accused of 280 counts of sexually abusing nursery school children -- and exposed the first of the prosecutorial abuses described in No Crueler Tyrannies. No Crueler Tyrannies recalls the hysteria that accompanied the child sex-abuse witch-hunts of the 1980s and 1990s: how a single anonymous phone call could bring to bear an army of recovered-memory therapists, venal and ambitious prosecutors, and hypocritical judges -- an army that jailed hundreds of innocent Americans.
Customer Reviews:
The power of accusation.......2003-09-24
Americans tend to put great faith in their justice system but, despite the legal doctrine of the presumption of innocence, they also tend to assume that persons accused of crimes are in fact guilty. This book deals with the power of accusations, in combination with dubious expert testimony, to undermine a person's right to a fair hearing and result in the incarceration of innocent individuals. It focuses on some of the most public sex abuse prosecutions during the 1980's and 1990's and shows how justice was subverted by a combination of overzealous "experts," unfair limitations on the defendants' ability to present exculpatory evidence, and the vagaries of the appeals process. These cases, and particularly the Wenatchee prosecutions, are about as close as American justice has come to the Kangaroo courts of the former Soviet Union.
One of the book's strong points is its explanations of how so called experts spend weeks coercing children to accuse adults that they had been sexually abused relying on the principle that a child who denies such events occurred is necessarily repressing their memory and a child that makes the accusation is telling the truth. In such a case, no accused person can ever be cleared. Readers interested in this issue might also want to look at Whores of the Court by Margaret Hagen. It also shows how prosecutors used the experts to present testimony that what the children said was true and how judges limited cross-examination and rebuttal evidence on the grounds that it was bad for the children. The book also offers some eye-opening detail on the limits of the appeals process to correct injustices.
The book could have been better had it gone into more depth on the viewpoints of the prosecutors and their experts. It also could have benefitted from a more detailed discussion of the kinds of testimony that occurs in bona fide sexual abuse cases. However, these shortcomings do not detract significantly from the major premise that in some cases the political and social weight given to an accusation can deprive patently innocent people of their right to justice.
Take two grains of salt and call me in the morning.......2003-08-12
"No Crueler Tyrannies" retells the frightening prosecutions of supposed child sexual predators in the 1990s, focusing on the Fells Acre Day School case in Malden, Massachusetts. The book also skims over several other less notorious cases of horrifying child abuse. All of these cases show the alarming propensity among some prosecutors in the 1980s and 1990s to throw otherwise law-abiding citizens into prison, using the coached testimony of young children. Not to mention the Catch-22 judgements of so-called child experts who convinced juries that a child's denial of abuse was proof that it had taken place.
The 1980s-an era when it was more and more common for working parents to entrust their children to day care centers-were ripe for bizarre child molestation cases. The guilt and anxiety parents felt over leaving their children with "strangers" made it easy for parents to believe that their worst nightmares were coming true. When outlandish charges arose, the path of least psychic resistance for parents was to swallow them whole them than with a grain of salt.
The book is a quick read, and sketchy on details. Rabinowitz states her conclusions about testimony rather than laying it out for us to judge on our own. The accused are all ordinary, noble souls with all the cards stacked against them; the prosecutors all blinded by ambition or stupidity, desperate to placate a howling mob looking for convictions. This left me with a certain discomfort: a classic tactic for ideologues is to paint reality in black and white, shouting their conclusions without disclosing their premises or evidence. There is some of this flair to this book. I'd love to see the Amiraults do something boneheaded that feeds into the mob's preconceptions, just to show they are capable of making mistakes. This weakness aside, it's hard not to be angry and frightened that prosecutors can so skew facts (in one case, holding back audio tape of an alleged perpetrator's anxious denial of the charges) and that the rest of us can so blithely go along with them. It's one thing to see this on "The Practice," and quite another to see it in real life.
The post-9/11 environment is ripe for similar cases - this time targeting those who are perceived to be soft on homeland security. Books like Rabinowitz's, however imperfect, serve as cautionary tales of our paranoid propensity to believe the worst about each other.
A Distressing Tale of Injustice.......2003-07-28
In Malden, Massachusetts, for twenty years the Fells Acres Day School increasingly became the place parents wanted their children to attend. It was founded by Violet Amirault and run also by her daughter Cheryl and son Gerald, all of whom were well respected within the community. There was a waiting list for attendance. But in 1984, horrific charges were lodged against the school and incredible descriptions of abuse were spread. In 1986, Gerald was found guilty of rapes and indecent assaults and given a sentence of thirty to forty years. The next year, Violet and Cheryl were sent to prison for similar charges. As documented in _No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times_ (Wall Street Journal Books) by Dorothy Rabinowitz, the three were not only innocent of the offenses; the offenses never even occurred, except in the minds of prosecutors, of so-called experts on child abuse, and of coached children. While this is material that will be familiar to those who have read about bogus satanic scares and incidents such as the more famous McMartin preschool case, Rabinowitz offers impassioned but reasonable histories of the Amirault case and others that raise serious questions about the functioning of our legal system.
The Amiraults' troubles seem to have begun when Gerald changed a boy's underpants. After that, the mother started worrying about the boy's bedwetting and other problems; bedwetting, according to a rash of media stories at the time, was a symptom of child abuse. Gerald was arrested, the school was closed, and charges grew. Other children began to report that they had been forced to drink urine and had been raped with knives and sticks, assaulted by a man in a clown suit, and tied naked to a schoolyard tree in front of the teachers and students. These atrocities had supposedly been happening for the past two years with no previous complaints, and no parents dropping in at the school had noticed anything out of the ordinary. There was never any physical evidence; how the children might have been probed with knives without physical result was never explained. The similar accusations within schools which had turned out to be fraudulent never made investigators or prosecutors doubt the rightness of their crusades. The officials involved never had to bear any penalty for ruining the lives of the falsely accused.
In many of the stories, reason eventually triumphed, and the miscarriages were rectified, although sometimes after long stretches in prison. Rabinowitz first reported on the Amiraults in the _Wall Street Journal_ in 1995, and readers who could easily see how stupidly the courts were carrying on donated thousands of dollars for their legal fees. One reader paid for the college tuition of Gerald's daughters. Gerald himself could not have paid. With eventual general public and legal agreement that he had been profoundly mistreated by the courts, his case became a political football. The usually unforgiving Governor's Board of Pardons ruled unanimously in 2001 that his sentence should be commuted. His mother and sister had previously been cleared of the identical charges. The Governor of Massachusetts at the time knew what a liability being "soft on crime" and allowing a child abuser to go free would be for future political support, and inexplicably connected the case to that of a real child abuser who had been easily convicted because of videotapes and other physical evidence leading to a confession. Gerald Amirault remains in prison. Rabinowitz's title for this clear and troubling book comes from a quotation from the Baron de Montesquieu, who in 1742 wrote, "There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice." We are not yet free of these tyrannies.
Absolutely chilling.......2003-06-23
The negative reviews to this book seem to be saying that, if we ever say that someone is falsely accused of child molestation, then we're pretending that molestation doesn't exist. This is *precisely* the twisted logic that rainroaded innocent people into jail for crimes that never took place.
Rabinowitz has to claim early on in her book things that are so obvious that it hurts to read them. *Of course* child molestation is a horrific crime which merits society's strongest possible response. That does not, however, mean that every accusation is true, and that normal stadards of evidence and logic can be discarded if the charge is sufficiently evil.
The cases that Rabinowitz recounts are not just of innocent people convicted of crimes they didn't commit. Her stories are about innocent people convicted of crimes that weren't commited by *anyone*. The only child molesters in these stories are the "helping professionals" who have psychologically maimed children by brainwashing them into believing that they were sexually violated.
I give Rabinowitz credit for her determination. I have quibbles with her writing style, but her work is a powerful resource.
Questionable Research.......2003-06-14
Read the Wenatchee portion of her book and realized she did not ask any hard questions of the people she feels were wronged.
Actual statements of some of the accused as reported in the newspapers and in court of appeals records raises questions about Ms Rabinowitz's conclusions.
Average customer rating:
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Witness to Our Time (A Studio Book)
Alfred Eisenstaedt
Manufacturer: Studio
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Eisenstaedt, Alfred
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ASIN: 0670777021 |
Book Description
The definitive biography of a Russian priest, murdered with an axe in a forest on the way to church. In photo album format, with great narrative detail about the life and works of this amazing man. Depicts major events in this martyr's life, with over 100 pictures. His influence on contemporary Russia is unmistakeable. A friend of Solshenitsyn and Sakharov, his martyrdom is not to be forgotten. He drew hundreds to his lectures and sermons from all walks of life. 'This book is a must for anyone remotely interested in the history of the Russian Church in the second half of this century' - Bp. BASIL (Osborne)
Customer Reviews:
Witness To The World.......2000-11-18
Yves Hamant has done the West a service by introducing readers to a personality that otherwise might have been lost in the Russian transition that has taken place over the last 15 years. Father Alexander Men was a voice "crying in the wilderness" of the Soviet domination of Russian culture. His ministry, which lasted for forty years, covered the worst possible times for the Russian believer. Father Men was the intellect that made it possible for the Russian person, believer or not, to begin the healing process.
Yves Hamant presents an excellent overview of Fr. Men's life from his earliest exposure to Christianity through his intellectual and spiritual journey through his ordination and ministry in a society that made it dangerous for him to practice what he believed. I would highly recommend this book for anyone that is interested in the Russian renaisance of culture and spirituality. I would also recommend it as a good primer for the serious student of the crisis in Christianity in the West today.
Average customer rating:
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Witness to Our Times: My Life as a Photojournalist
Flip Schulke
Manufacturer: Cricket Books/Marcato
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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Martin Luther King, Jr: A Documentary, Montgomery to Memphis
ASIN: 0812626826 |
Book Description
Over the course of his 50-year career, Flip Schulke has been published in Life, Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated and has photographed Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr., Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, and the first astronauts of the American space program. His images from the 1960s stunned American magazine readers, helping to raise public awareness and influence the course of history. Here Schulke recounts how he built a career out of his passion for documenting social change. Including dozens of photographs and illustrations, this is a heartfelt and revealing profile of one of America’s most celebrated photo-journalists.
Books:
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