Dust jacket notes: "Some novels create a world as enclosed as a terrarium. A Piece of My Heart ranges wide in its landscapes, human and geographic, yet the heart is broken into pieces by repeated and obsessive sequences - by violence, by cruelty, by sexual love coupling with hatred, and by purposeless random accident. Richard Ford tells the violent, comic, and deeply moving story of two men, one pursuing a woman, the other pursuing himself. Robard and Sam meet in a bizarre household on an island hideaway in the Mississippi. Their original intentions in going to the island are quickly obscured by the world of purposelessness they have entered, and are ultimately sacrificed in the explosive finale. This Southern landscape flowers with victims, like the deer swimming to shore suddenly sucked under and drowned by an enormous fish. The novel opens with a mysterious murder; who has been shot is not known. In this drama the victims are predators, the predators victims. The finest of the many fascinating characters in the book, a man of fierceness, of ancient purpose, a survivor and predator - becomes his own last victim. A Piece of My Heart is grim, phobic, nightmarish, and almost intolerable; it is redeemed by its own extremity. The pieces of these hearts share a vitality and an intensity greater than any new author has brought to fiction for decades. Character after character is particular, special, different, located, and exact. Place and scene, action and image and smell, dialogue above all - in this novel the texture of the lived life is urgent, breathes through each word, reproduces itself like a permanent after-image on the reader's imagination. And last - therefore maybe first - through all its blackness, this hazardous, doomed vision is profoundly comic. Richard Ford is the darkest, the funniest, and the best new American novelist."

A Piece of My Heart

Literature & Fiction

FORD, RICHARD

Literary

Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

We have for years needed a serious, scholarly, readable work on the Confederate nation that rounds up modem scholarship and offers a fresh and detached view of the whole subject. This work fills that order admirably ... [Thomas] sensibly and deftly integrates the course of Southern military fortunes with the concerns that shaped them and were shaped by them. In doing so he also manages to convey a sense of how the war itself deteriorated from something spirited and gallant to something base and mean and modern on both sides.

The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865 (New American Nation Series)

History

Emory M. Thomas

Americas

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Traces the development of the idea of liberty from seventeenth-century America, and discusses the change in its meaning to people from all social levels

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Oscar Handlin

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God, man, and Archie Bunker

On religion: "He made everyone the same religion - Christian. Which He named after His Son, Christian . . . or Christ for short. And that's how it was for years. One religion. Until they started splitting 'em up to all them other denumerations. But there's still only one religion. His up there." . . . On forgiveness: "What wrong with revenge? That's a perfect way to get even." . . . On the American Dream: "There's three great things that happens to a man in his lifetime. Buying a house . . . a car . . . and a new color T.V. That's what America is all about." . . . On modern medicine: "You go because He wants you. And when He wants you. And He don't want no quack doctors putting new hearts into you and keeping you here against His will 'cause it throw Him off His schedule. It throw Him all off. Now you do that to Him . . . throw His schedule off like that . . . you'll have to answer to Him, won't you?" . . . On death: "Everybody's gotta die sometime. That's life."

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Spencer Marsh

Religion & Spirituality

Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age

This provocative study addresses some of the most challenging spiritual questions of our times.

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New Age & Spirituality

Reexamines U.S. history from the Civil War to World War I, and looks at the roles of robber barons, farmers, and factory workers

Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States.

Wasserman, Harvey

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