Book Description
A young widow raising two boys, Sarah Laden is struggling to keep her family together. But when a shocking revelation rips apart the family of her closest friend, Sarah finds herself welcoming yet another troubled young boy into her already tumultuous life.
Jordan, a quiet, reclusive elementary school classmate of Sarah's son Danny, has survived a terrible ordeal. By agreeing to become Jordan's foster mother, Sarah will be forced to question the things she has long believed. And as the delicate threads that bind their family begin to unravel, all the Ladens will have to face difficult truths about themselves and one another—and discover the power of love necessary to forgive and to heal.
Customer Reviews:
Disturbing Subject Matter.......2007-09-26
I think this book was well written but as the parent of a young child I had a hard time getting past the delicate subject matter.
A book you can't put down.......2007-09-21
I picked this book up at the book store without any prior knowledge of its story line or popularity. Once I began reading it, I couldn't put it down. It deals with child abuse by describing the impact it has on all who it involves -- the victim, parent, caretaker, victim's friends, etc. I thought the impact was thoughtfully and realistically described. At the same time, the story line is absolutely compelling. You are kept guessing about the true involvement of the mother. I loved Sarah as a character as well as the detailed manner in which her culinary skills were relayed. This was a great read.
Haunting, stirring read.......2007-08-11
"The Kindness of Strangers" is about the looming specter of child abuse. It paints a vivid portrait of suffering and healing, offering readers an unflinching look at the devastating effects of sexual abuse, and how it can happen even in "good" neighborhoods.
Two years after her husband's death, Sarah Laden's family is barely holding together. Her oldest Nathan is reckless and irresponsible; while her youngest son Danny is withdrawn and quiet. Sarah herself struggles; and if it wasn't for the unflagging friendship of her best friend Courtney Kendrick, she'd be lost and alone.
Everything she knows about the Kendricks is shattered when Sarah interrupts young Jordan Kendrick's bizarre suicide attempt. In the aftermath, the police uncover shocking evidence of an underground pedophile ring - with the Kendricks at its head - and the neighborhood is plunged into a maelstrom of betrayal, outrage, and scandal. Meanwhile, the Ladens are confronted with the daunting task of reaching out to Jordan in the midst of their own grief.
"The Kindness of Strangers" is sometimes difficult to endure, because Kittle doesn't mince words in portraying the devastation of child molestation. Her bluntness deflates our preferred assumption that this could never happen in our neighborhoods, and forces us to consider a subject most would rather ignore. However, this is a novel of recovery and healing, and though the narrative displays realistic failures, setbacks, and denial, it shows that time can heal wounds - but only when there are willing hands to apply the necessary balm of selfless kindness.
Beautifully written.......2007-08-11
It's one thing to hear about child abuse in the news...and quite another to learn that your neighbor's 11-year-old son has been molested for years by his own parents. That's exactly what happens to Sarah Laden, a recently widowed caterer struggling with her own grief and two adolescent sons.
After the traumatized young Jordan is hospitalized following a botched suicide attempt, Sarah's son convinces her that it's their duty to become his foster family. Although Sarah feels they have enough of their own problems -- least of all being Jordan's sudden unexplained falling-out with his former best friend, Sarah's younger son Danny -- she also feels a need to figure out what's happened, within her own mind. Since she, a grown woman and an outsider, cannot truly fathom the things that the Kendricks did, both with their own son and other children, it's little wonder that Jordan feels completely violated and without hope.
I think the author did a fine job, combining a fictitious account of a young boy's horrors with factual information, allowing the readers to come away feeling like they've gained some insight on a very real situation that affects all too many innocent children in our society.
Disappointing.......2007-08-08
I worked with abused children for a number of years, and I was impressed by the research that Kittle did for her book. However, I would have appreciated a more tightly knit story. Throughout the book, I kept wishing that the author would get out of the way of the story, and that the editor had cut out at least 100 pages, if not more. In a well written book, we don't have to be told how someone feels - a good writer knows how to show the characters' emotions through their actions. Maybe that's why I didn't find the characters very believable. Yes, things like this happen in good neighborhoods and in normal-looking families, but it seemed to me that the author just trotted out some stereotypical characters and tried to find motivation for them. For example, it's pretty darn unusual for a neighbor to adopt a child when there are relatives who could take him in, and frankly I don't think that a real-life Sarah would have volunteered to care for Jordan. Her boys were cookie-cutter children, and Mark was a caricature of a pedophile. Courtney was semi-believable until she showed up to snatch Jordan from Sarah's house - that scene was a bit over-the-top. Jordan was the most believable character, but Kittle just used way too much verbiage to describe his emotions. And, really, was it absolutely necessary to give us quite that much detail about what went on in that house? It's one thing to bring a sensitive subject out in the open, and quite another to beat us over the head with it.
Book Description
This is the first complete, critical biography of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), one of America's finest playwrights and the author of (among many important works) The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, and The Night of the Iguana. Award-winning biographer Donald Spoto gives us not only a full and accurate account of Williams's life, he also reveals the intimate connections between the playwright's personal dramas and his remarkably autobiographical art. From his birth into a genteel Southern family, through his success, celebrity, and wealth, to his drug addictions, promiscuity, and creative struggles, Tennessee Williams lived a life as gripping as his plays. The Kindness of Strangers, based on Williams's own papers, his mother's diaries, and interviews with scores of friends, lovers, and professional associates, is, in the author's words, a portrait of "a man more disturbing, more dramatic, richer and more wonderful than any character he created."
Customer Reviews:
The Broken World of Tennessee Williams.......2000-04-29
The last words of the book, "at last there was stillness," exemplify Spoto's ability to capture the chaos of this genius's life. Although the book is somewhat fast paced and races over portions of Williamss life, it is meticulously researched and digs up every facet of Tennessee Williams. Spoto reveals the glory days of the pulitzer prize winning playwright and the nightmare of his last two decades in which he watched success wane as fastidious critics, ignorantly demanding that Williams continue to deliver plays in the vein of Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named desire, beat him literally to death. One must have emotions of steel to get through the book's later chapters, in which Williams suffers a miserable descent into drug addiction and madness. Despite Williams's wealth and fame, the man lived a terribly difficult life. From his chaotic childhood to his drugged, alcoholic and lonely end, Williams's life was perhaps his greatest drama, as Spoto reveals.
A thorough life tour of "10," but with a sour thesis........2000-03-18
Yes, Tennesee Williams signed some of his letters as "10." That's just one of the many things you'll learn from reading Spoto's 1985 biography of this famous American playwright. More complete, thorough and sympathetic biographies have been issued since this one, but Spoto's is still worth reading. It has the virtue of concision (it runs about 400 pages, which for a crowded life like Williams had isn't long), at least. I don't argue with Spoto's view that Williams lived a largely miserable life, sank into rampant substance abuse, and hurt most of the people who cared for him. By the time he died, he couldn't get a good review for any new play he wrote. No one in the theater world liked him. It took his death for his career to start to recover, but at this point the late plays are getting better-reviewed productions, and the scope of his entire achievement (including his work in fiction and poetry) is finally being assimilated. From this distance, the only American playwright of the 20th century who might be put into the same class is O'Neill. I would vote for Williams. Anyone who reads this book will have to be willing to take Spoto's unsympathetic reading of Williams's life. At times he lectures the dead subject of the book like a prim schoolmarm (he did the same in his Hitchcock biography). The book is still a gripping portrait of one of the greatest, and saddest, literary giants America has produced. I believe the tragedy of his genius rivals Poe's.
Book Description
In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell argues persuasively that child abandonment was a common and morally acceptable practice from antiquity until the Renaissance. Using a wide variety of sources, including drama and mythological-literary texts as well as demographics, Boswell examines the evidence that parents of all classes gave up unwanted children, "exposing" them in public places, donating them to the church, or delivering them in later centuries to foundling hospitals. The Kindness of Strangers presents a startling history of the abandoned child that helps to illustrate the changing meaning of family.
"Highly original, learned, and skillfully written. . . . A mine of fascinating and surprising information about every aspect of the history of family limitation in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance Europe."—Bernard Knox, New York Review of Books
"A formidably learned, ingenious, at times eloquent investigation. Professor Boswell is a young historian of rare force and originality."—George Steiner, New Yorker
"Bold, original and, very likely, controversial. . . . This is a pioneering work of large importance, the first to map out and explore a tangled, mysterious region of human experience."—Mary Martin McLaughlin, New York Times Book Review
Customer Reviews:
Excellent History of the abandonment of Children.......2007-05-27
I picked up this book at a thrift store with no real idea of what it was about. The topic sounded interesting and I thought it was worth a try. What a shock it was to read how children where abandoned in the past because they were defective, illegitimate, inconvenient and threaded to mess up inheritance laws.
When we read history we tend to assume our current values applied in the past too....this is not the case...we learned from out mistakes and made changes in our life's to try to put value on human life.
I recommend this book to anyone; including teens....it will open your eyes and your heart.
The fate of children.......2003-05-27
This book of Boswell's is a fascinating history of an previously unknown and essentially overlooked piece of history -- the situation for children, and what happened to them should they become orphaned or abandoned. Boswell's particular period and geographic centre is in Europe of Late Antiquity to the Renaissance.
Beginning by looking at the ideal of family structure and responsibilities in the Roman Empire (the dominant model throughout the western world), Boswell proceeds through time periods to the Renaissance, examining literary and legal documents for narrative stories of children and caretakers, and for the general policy of church and state organisations toward care or neglect of such. One such narrative as example will serve to illustrate:
'...in Fresne (The Ash Tree) a married woman has maliciously spread the tale that the birth of twins means that the mother has slept with two men, and when she herself then bears twins, she must face an opprobrium of her own creation. She contemplates killing one, but--significantly--her companions dissuade her from this, arguing that it would be a sin. Abandonment, however, was not...'
The woman gives a child to her maid who then leaves it in a church -- while the story turns out badly, it is not due to the abandonment, which was considered in this High Middle Ages tale quite natural and proper.
Boswell's antipathy toward the Catholic church shows forth a bit in his interpretation (which may nonetheless be valid) with statements such as: 'Christianity may well have increased the rate of abandonment, both by insisting more rigidly than any other moral system on the absolute necessity of procreative purpose in all human sexual acts, and by providing, through churches and monasteries, regular and relatively humane modes of abandoning infants nearly everywhere on the continent.'
A wonderful glimpse into a shadowy world at the sidelines of history, yet one of crucial importance for those of us who live in a 'family values' historical period. If we do not know our past, how can we be sure of our present?
Staggering Erudition.......2003-04-14
First, let me explain that I am not using this book in any class I teach(unlike the other 2 previous reviewers). I read this out of my own interest. Second, it is odd that only 2 prior reviews exist on this site, since I believe this to be an important book by the author of two well-known and controversial works about homosexuality and Christianity.
Third, allow me to rebut the negative review below. It is unclear how "college students" could fully evaluate Boswell's scholarship. While his numerous and lengthy footnotes can be a chore, his meticulous referencing of sources is admirable. And he quotes those sources in their ORIGINAL languages in many cases:Greek, Latin, Italian, Irish, Norse, Icelandic etc. How did the college students mentioned above possibly find his references "contradictory and wrong??"
In sum, this book is provocative and original. It would take scholars in the field of child history (granted a small field, if it indeed could be deemed one)an entire year to fully digest this tome and scrutinize its sources. Any thinking person interested in the evolution of human attitudes towards adoption, the protection and rearing of children, and child abuse MUST reckon with this marvelous work.
Original, Provocative and Persuasive.......2003-02-27
I assigned the text in my upper-division graduate and graduate courses, and students rave about it. They encounter a world they can hardly imagine, one where families and parents must make quite heinous (to the modern reader) decisions to abandon their children. Boswell documents the widespread character of the practice. I found the work quite well written and informative.
Sloppy research..........2002-08-02
The book proposes to be a comprehensive study of the history of adoption and child abandonment. Unfortunately, the book contains many contradictions and mistakes, to the point where my college-level class all wrote it off as a waste.
Customer Reviews:
great travel book .......2005-09-04
Lonely Planet has done a great job of collecting travel stories of all moods and locations from great writers, some well known and others just beginning.
It would be a great book to take travelling because you could finish a story intead of interrupting a novel.
The stories feel so real that you want to say "don't get in that car". Other stories make you well up in emotion at the "Kindness of Strangers."
Stories flow well together..........2004-08-23
From the Dalai Lama's preface, right through the stories of the quest for underwear in Buenos Aires and finding a campsite in the Sahara, you feel as if you are with the writers.
My favourite, perhaps, involves the travel of a postcard and two women from the shores of Galapagos to Veneto and the people they meet.
A quick but enjoyable read.
May I Just Say "Lovely"?..........2004-05-07
This was such a lovely little book. The stories were filled with vivid descriptions of the travels and encounters of many a traveler. Some inspired laughter, others tears, and some the weird juxtaposition of the two simultaneously! Really a beautiful collection that speaks to the possibility of innate goodness across racial, religious and linguistic lines. Quite refreshing!
Average customer rating:
- Gripping
- Great book
- refreshing glimpse of American spirit
- Up lifting must read
- Makes me ashamed not only to be American, but to be human
|
Kindness of Strangers
Mike McIntyre
Manufacturer: Berkley Trade
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Sociologists
| Professionals & Academics
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
| 19th Century
| 20th Century
| 21st Century
| African Americans
| Civil War
| Colonial Period
| General
| Revolution & Founding
| State & Local
Travel
| Writing
| Reference
| Subjects
| Books
North America
| Travel
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Travel
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0425154556 |
Amazon.com
A road-trip and self-discovery book with a difference: McIntyre hitchhiked across America with no money, accepting only the "kindness of strangers"--rides, food, shelter, and the occasional beer. This book grew on me with every page, just as McIntyre's feelings for the ordinary people he met grew with every mile. Few books I've read since Studs Terkel's Hard Times (a classic oral history about the Great Depression) so effectively captured the day-to-day lives of typical Middle Americans, with all their strengths and weaknesses. Highly Recommended.
Customer Reviews:
Gripping.......2007-04-25
This book was so entertaining. I couldn't put it down. I kept wondering what would happen on the next leg of his trip and if he would make it or not to his final destination. I would even go back and read parts aloud to my husband, who is not a reader, and he was hooked also.
Great book.......2006-04-21
Uplifting, There are good people out there, and the most generous sometimes have the least.
refreshing glimpse of American spirit.......2001-11-25
in light of recent events this book shed a ray of light on the dimming light of humanity in our world. A man leaves home with only identification and hitch hikes across the country relying only on the "kindness of strangers." Although he clearly points out that were he not male and caucasion the outcome could have been much different, the story is still heart warming. I have recommended this to sooo many friends and all have thanked me profusely for helping them search their hearts and souls with out being battered with questions of faith.
Up lifting must read.......2001-09-20
I have purchased numerous copies of this book to give to friends. After recently rediscovering book and reading for 5th time I was checking amazon to see if Mike McIntyre has any other titles. I felt compeled to write a review. In light of the recent World Trade center attack I really need something that confirmed my belief that good people are all around us. It really lifted me out of my gloom. A++++
Makes me ashamed not only to be American, but to be human.......2001-08-07
What a godawful story about the scum and dregs of humanity as experienced by one hitch hiker. Even worse, the book was neither entertaining nor particularly well written. Don't waste your time or money on this book.
Book Description
The Kindness of Strangers tells the story of a group of concerned adults who mentor inner-city youth. It describes what volunteers can do to ameliorate the conditions of young people living in poverty. It chronicles the rise of the mentoring movement and examines its wider implications for education and social policy. Based on interviews with over 300 mentors, young people, scholars, and youth workers, The Kindness of Strangers takes a hard look at mentoring and asks some critical questions: How much can mentoring really accomplish? What does it take to be a successful mentor? What makes the difference between an effective program and one fraught with difficulties? Marc Freedman brings experience, research, and realism to these questions in an effort to present the truth about the mentoring movement sweeping America today. This revised edition contains a new introduction that highlights research that has been conducted since the original publication of the book in 1993. Marc Freedman is President of Civic Ventures, a research and development organization based in Berkeley, California. He has studied education and social policy for more than a decade and prior to starting Civic Ventures he was director of special projects for Public/Private Ventures, an organization focused on helping young people in poverty.
Customer Reviews:
Mentoring-a difficult task.......2006-12-12
This book focused primarily on adults who have mentored inner-city youth by providing guidance to youth during difficult times. The author, Marc Freedman acknowledges the fact that mentoring is a difficult task for anyone to take on, especially when it involves difficult or problematic individuals, but reaching out and allowing youth to become emotionally connected with their mentors provides an amazing outcome and rewards the mentor for their endurance and perseverance.
The author's background and personal experience with researching the effects on mentoring on youth in America is made clear throughout the book. Freeman highlights his research within the book and encompasses it with a deep personal care in regards to the fate of youth growing up in poverty. For the creation of this boo Freedman interviews over 300 mentors, you people, scholars, and youth workers and gathers that information to examine some difficult questions mentors face nowadays such as; how much can mentoring really accomplish, what does it take to be a successful mentor, and what makes the difference between an effective program and one fraught with difficulties.
The book is divided up into 10 main areas which focus on calling individuals to action, creating great expectation, recurring fervor, birth of a movement, the benefits of mentoring, making the most of mentoring, closing the caring gap, re-engaging the middle class, and reinventing the community.
Average customer rating:
- a wonderful Christmas fable
|
The Man Who Walked the Earth
Manufacturer: Groundwood Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Stories
| Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths
| Literature
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Literature
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Family Life
| People & Places
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
Fiction
| Christmas
| Holidays & Festivals
| People & Places
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
Fiction
| Values
| Social Situations
| People & Places
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
Picture Books
| Ages 4-8
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Ages 4-8
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
Wallace, Ian
| ( W )
| Authors & Illustrators, A-Z
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
Similar Items:
-
Winter's Gift
-
Lucia and the Light
-
Christmas Day in the Morning
-
East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon (Works in Translation)
-
Father and Son
ASIN: 0888995458 |
Book Description
Andre and Elise’s father has gone in search of work, and may not be home for Christmas. The day he left, their mother set an extra place at the table in case a hungry stranger visits. “Wherever your father is, I hope someone will set a place for him,” she says. Eight months later, no one has come to their door. Then a mysterious stranger arrives on Christmas night and performs dazzling magic tricks. Can he use magic to bring back their father? In this wonderful story about the rewards of being kind to strangers, Ian Wallace has performed his own kind of magic.
Customer Reviews:
a wonderful Christmas fable.......2003-12-02
Another simply told tale from Ian Wallace. His text is spare, straightforward, and compelling. The illustrations, like so many of his, are evocative of place and time, with enough detail to make us feel the homeliness of the house and its inhabitants. The warmth of lamplight spills into each scene, guarding us and the characters of brother and sister and mother against the harsh cold of the out of doors, really of the world. The arrival of the stranger out of the cold, his magic tricks, his presentation of gifts, and his departure happen so fluidly that we, too, are caught up in the surprise and delight of his visit. The best of his gifts brings this story to its close, and we want to read it again to recapture the magic.
Average customer rating:
- Steamy New Orleans and vivid characters
- Dreadful. Julie Smith Doesn't Miss a Cliche in this One
- Gripping and engrossing
- Never depend on the kindness of strangers
- Skip Langdon meets Evil, Greed and Corruption in New Orleans
|
Kindness of Strangers
Julie Smith
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
United States
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
| 18th Century
| 19th Century
| 20th Century
| African American
| Asian American
| Classics
| Collections & Readers
| Drama
| General
| Hispanic
| History & Criticism
| Humor
| Jewish American
| Letters & Correspondence
| Native American
| Poetry
| Short Stories
| Women Writers
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Police Procedurals
| Mystery & Thrillers
| Subjects
| Books
Smith, Julie
| ( S )
| Authors, A-Z
| Mystery & Thrillers
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Mystery & Thrillers
| Subjects
| Books
Similar Items:
-
House of Blues (Skip Langdon Novels)
-
New Orleans Beat (Skip Langdon Novels)
-
Crescent City Kill (Skip Langdon Novels)
-
82 Desire
-
The Axeman's Jazz: A Skip Langdon Novel (Skip Langdon Novels)
ASIN: 0449909379
Release Date: 1996-07-09 |
Book Description
Julie Smith's New Orleans is not a city, it's a world--exotic, sweetly perverse, dangerously seductive. Nowhere else does politics make stranger bedfellows; and the approaching mayoral election is stranger than most, pitting the usual thugs and vipers against a seeming breath of fresh air--Errol Jacomine, a liberal-minded, civic-spirited preacher. The only problem is, in the opinion of Police Detective Skip Langdon, Jacomine is a psychopath and dangerous as hell.
On leave of absence from the police force, Skip becomes obsessed with exposing the frightening figure beneath Jacomine's good-guy image. Immediately, an anonymous army of spies and hatchet men go to work on her, and Skip begins to understand that in opposing Jacomine, she is risking not only her livelihood but her sanity and possibly the lives of people she loves.
Skip's instincts seem confirmed when the only witness to Jacomine's crimes turns up dead. Skip thinks there are more bodies buried in Jacomine's past, but it's the present she's worried about. And protecting one of her own against the preacher's evil sends Skip to the dark center of bayou country, where even the elements are her enemy. A deadly chase through the swamp during a fierce hurricane forces Skip to rely not on the kindness of strangers but on her own inner strength to survive.
No other novelist so brilliantly sustains the mood of ominous tension or raises the heat index as Julie Smith does in her Skip Langdon novels. Of them all, The Kindness of Strangers tears most fiercely at the heart.
Customer Reviews:
Steamy New Orleans and vivid characters.......2004-06-02
Struggling with depression over a shooting from her last case, New Orleans police detective Skip Langdon is forced to take a leave of absence, freeing her to pursue her obsession with mayoral candidate Errol Jacomine in Edgar Award-winner Smith's sixth in the series.
Jacomine, a liberal, civic-minded preacher in almost everybody's book, strikes Langdon as a dangerous psychopath. When her initial probes spur a relentless telephone campaign against her, complete with innuendo, slander and heated defenses of Jacomine, even Langdon is taken aback. But not deterred.
Smith's narrative weaves among the viewpoints of various characters, giving the reader an inside view of Jacomine's headquarters, civic projects and a converging subplot involving a doomed romance between an unhappy teenager and Jacomine's new press secretary.
As Langdon exposes Jacomine's past, the press secretary's misgivings about his boss and his illicit love collide. The climax rushes toward murder and kidnapping, culminating in a harrowing chase through bayou country in the midst of a hurricane.
Smith delves deeply into the hearts and psyches of her characters, letting their human motivations drive the plot. Her New Orleans is, as always, a vividly evoked cauldron of beauty, political corruption, cultural richness and steamy heat. Her plot hums with tension but it's Smith's seamlessly perceptive writing that sets this novel apart from the crowd.
Dreadful. Julie Smith Doesn't Miss a Cliche in this One.......2000-04-21
Smith's cardboard characters include a perky gay man (ooh, he cooks, how original), foul mouthed alcoholic mom and her thoroughly dislikeable teenage daughter, raving psychopath bad guy (honestly, could she make it a little clearer that he's evil?), and chronically depressed main character, Skip Langdon. Okay, Skip, here's some advice -- lose 20 pounds and take a vacation.
I found few redeeming features in this poorly written, badly plotted exercise in tedium.
Gripping and engrossing.......1999-03-22
This is less a whodunit than a thriller, since it's clear from the start who the Bad Guy is. But that doesn't make it any less entertaining.
It's true, as another reveiwer says, that Skip is less confident in this novel. But to me, this adds rather than detracts. Skip's uncertainty, false starts, and growing fear are realistic, and her sense of doubting her own reality increases the tension in the novel.
As often happens when reading series novels, the side plots and secondary characters often are more interesting than the primary puzzle. Smith's teenagers are particularly good -- she seems to me to be that rare adult who hasn't been struck with nostalgic amnesia about the pain of being a 15-year-old girl.
Beware, the ending does not "sew up" all the loose ends, so you'll have to be ready to move on to the next one in a hurry!
Never depend on the kindness of strangers.......1998-04-11
Officer Skip Langdon is back, but she's not quite who she used to be, she's on a leave of absence from the New Orleans Police Department. A recent assignment has left her a bit tattered and torn. She's lost some of her humor and strength, characteristics that made Skip so lovable. Now she's tormented by a new evil, a preacher running for Mayor, that she is convinced is a cold blooded killer. Enter Errol Jaccomine, a charismatic man, leading his flock. His followers are more cultists than parishoners and his expectations of them are way beyond that of a traditional religious leader. And while many see him as a savior for the corrupt New Orleans, Skip sees a sadistic manipulator who just wants more power.
Smith has created a complex villian. who we will no doubt see again, as he embodies everything Skip is not. His character is evil incarnate and every scene he is in is at once riviting and repulsive. My reservation is that Skip seems to be losing herself in this latest story and that would be a crime.
Skip Langdon meets Evil, Greed and Corruption in New Orleans.......1998-04-11
Errol Jacomine is running for mayor. Jacomine is a preacher who many hope to be the savior who will unite a New Orleans divided by race, greed and corruption. New Orleans Police Detective Skip Langdon has met Jacomine and can see his evil. On temporary leave from the force, New Orleans Police Detective Skip Langdon becomes obsessed with exposing Errol Jacomine. As she battles an invisible army conspiring to keep his name unsullied we are introduced to more of New Orleans' colorful milieu. Skip is a fragile, complex, tough woman who has the unforgiving and unheralded vocation of serving and protecting a community that oftentimes does not seem to care to be protected.
Average customer rating:
|
The Kindness of Strangers: And Other Clues to the Meaning of Life
James A. Buford
Manufacturer: Black Belt Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Interpersonal Relations
| Relationships
| Health, Mind & Body
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Essays
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Classics
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Ethics & Morality
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Inspirational
| Spirituality
| Religion & Spirituality
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1881320642 |
Average customer rating:
|
The Kindness of Strangers: Philanthropy and Higher Education (Issues in Academic Ethics (Paper))
Deni Elliott
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Funding
| Education
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Education
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| College & University
| Education
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Philosophy & Social Aspects
| Education Theory
| Education
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
College
| By Level
| Education
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0742507114 |
Book Description
In The Kindness of Strangers, Deni Elliott examines ethically questionable situations that have arisen in response to institutional dependency on external benefactors.
Books:
- The Nature of Animal Healing : The Definitive Holistic Medicine Guide to Caring for Your Dog and Cat
- The Nature of Animal Healing : The Definitive Holistic Medicine Guide to Caring for Your Dog and Cat
- The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation
- The Reef Aquarium: A Comprehensive Guide to the Identification and Care of Tropical Marine Invertebrates (Volume 1)
- The Reef Aquarium: A Comprehensive Guide to the Identification and Care of Tropical Marine Invertebrates (Volume 1)
- The Te of Piglet
- The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth
- The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy
- Training the Three-day Event Horse and Rider: Doubleday Equestrian Library
- Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Crafting and Executing Strategy : The Quest for Competitive Advantage - Concepts and Cases
- The Fragrance of God
- Igniting the Leader Within: Inspiring, Motivating, & Influencing Others
- Peterson Field Guide to Animal Tracks: Third Edition
- Sociology of North American Sport with PowerWeb
- The Journals of Lewis and Clark
- The Central Auditory System
- Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition
- Investing Under Fire: Winning Strategies from the Masters for Bulls, Bears, and the Bewildered
- Conflicting Sanity
