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  A Man of Few Words - The...

  Carlo Greppi

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  'Nobody knows how much I owe that man', Primo Levi said of his Italian compatriot Lorenzo Perrone, who saved his life at Auschwitz. 'I could never repay him'. Each day for a period of six months, Perrone, who worked beside Auschwitz in desperate conditions, risked his own life to smuggle part of his own soup ration to Levi, quietly leaving the mess tin by a half-constructed brick wall. Without those extra five hundred calories, Levi could not have survived, and would probably not have written If This Is a Man, the first published account by a Holocaust survivor.
  
  In A Man of Few Words, Carlo Greppi pieces together the life of Lorenzo Perrone, a bricklayer from the Piedmontese town of Fossano, not far from Levi's native Turin. Near-destitute and with minimal formal education, Perrone left very few traces of himself. Yet despite their stark differences – Levi was a middle-class chemist – their friendship survived the Holocaust and continued until Perrone's tragic death. Levi never forgot Perrone. In every book he wrote, he mentions that he owes his life to a man named Lorenzo, and he returned persistently, in the last years of his life, to the man of few words who saved his life.
  
  Compassionate, worldly and prescient, Greppi brings us a story that has much to say about the world we live in today, about an individual who kept hope alive in one of the darkest times and places known to humankind.

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  Hidden Mercy - AIDS Catholics...

  Michael J. O'Loughlin

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  The 1980s and 1990s, the height of the AIDS crisis in the United States, was decades ago now, and many of the stories from this time remain hidden: A Catholic nun from a small Midwestern town packs up her life to move to New York City, where she throws herself into a community under assault from HIV and AIDS. A young priest sees himself in the many gay men dying from AIDS and grapples with how best to respond, eventually coming out as gay and putting his own career on the line. A gay Catholic with HIV loses his partner to AIDS and then flees the church, focusing his energy on his own health rather than fight an institution seemingly rejecting him. 
   
   
   
  Set against the backdrop of the HIV and AIDS epidemic of the late twentieth century and the Catholic Church's crackdown on gay and lesbian activists, journalist Michael O'Loughlin searches out the untold stories of those who didn't look away, who at great personal cost chose compassion. 
   
   
   
  This is one journalist's—gay and Catholic himself—compelling picture of those quiet heroes who responded to human suffering when so much of society told them to look away. These pure acts of compassion and mercy offer us hope and inspiration as we continue to confront existential questions about what it means to be Americans, Christians, and human beings responding to those most in need.

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  Ottoman Empire’s Most Important...

  Editors Charles River

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  In terms of geopolitics, perhaps the most seminal event of the Middle Ages was the successful Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453. The city had been an imperial capital as far back as the 4th century, when Constantine the Great shifted the power center of the Roman Empire there, effectively establishing two almost equally powerful halves of antiquity’s greatest empire. Constantinople would continue to serve as the capital of the Byzantine Empire even after the Western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in the late 5th century. Naturally, the Ottoman Empire would also use Constantinople as the capital of its empire after their conquest effectively ended the Byzantine Empire, and thanks to its strategic location, it has been a trading center for years and remains one today under the Turkish name of Istanbul.  
  The end of the Byzantine Empire had a profound effect not only on the Middle East but Europe as well. Constantinople had played a crucial part in the Crusades, and the fall of the Byzantines meant that the Ottomans now shared a border with Europe. Indeed, the Ottomans would clash with Russians, Austrians, Venetians, Polish, and more before collapsing as a result of World War I, when they were part of the Central powers.  
  In the wake of taking Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire would spend the next few centuries expanding its size, power, and influence, bumping up against Eastern Europe and becoming one of the world’s most important geopolitical players. It was a rise that would not truly start to wane until the 19th century. Preserving its mixed heritage, coming from both its geographic position rising above the ashes of the Byzantine Empire and the tradition inherited from the Muslim Conquests, the Ottoman Empire lasted more than six centuries.

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  Take Back What the Devil Stole -...

  Onaje X. O. Woodbine

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  Ms. Donna Haskins is an African American woman who wrestles with structural inequity in the streets of Boston by inhabiting an alternate dimension she refers to as the “spirit realm.” In this other place, she is prepared by the Holy Spirit to challenge the restrictions placed upon Black female bodies in the United States. Growing into her spiritual gifts of astral flight and time travel, Donna meets the spirits of enslaved Africans, conducts spiritual warfare against sexual predators, and tends to the souls of murdered Black children whose ghosts haunt the inner city.  
   
  Take Back What the Devil Stole centers Donna’s encounters with the supernatural to offer a powerful narrative of how one woman seeks to reclaim her power from a lifetime of social violence. Both ethnographic and personal, Onaje X. O. Woodbine’s portrait of her spiritual life sheds new light on the complexities of Black women’s religious participation and the lived religion of the dispossessed. Woodbine explores Donna’s religious creativity and her sense of multireligious belonging as she blends together Catholic, Afro-Caribbean, and Black Baptist traditions. Through the gripping story of one local prophet, this audiobook offers a deeply original account of the religious experiences of Black women in contemporary America: their bodies, their haunted landscapes, and their spiritual worlds.

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  From Enlightenment To Revolution...

  Maximillian Robespierre, Edmund...

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  History is often concentrated into short bursts of change, with long periods of shifting before and waves of alteration afterwards. Nowhere is this more obvious than the thirty year interregnum between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. In this period, three figures stand tall; Pitt, the elder stateman who saw the need for genuine constitutionalism; Burke, the consummate parliamentarian, speaking for the glory of empire; and Robespierre, the legendary and controversial frontman of the French Revolution.William Pitt The Elder speaks about the need for key changes to the body politic. The first speech here predates the interregnum, being from 1738, when he was merely thirty, and covers a key factor in Britain’s colonial problems for the next two centuries, being the complete internal corruption of the army.Edmund Burke represents the height of Royalist sympathy as the age of revolution gets underway. He speaks on the need for conciliation with America after the disaster of the Stamp Act and revolution, on the need to punish Warren Hastings for treating his Asian holdings as his own empire to fill with his own corruption, and on the end of an era with the passing of Marie Antoinette.Finally, the age of revolution, both industrial and political, has begun. Robespierre argues for the dignity of man; for rejecting the divinity of royal authority in favour of that of the human spirit; against the death penalty, as being below the dignity of a truly humanist state; on enemies, internal and external, who push the people to reject their own interests for those of the powerful. This is but a small selection of the man’s incredible output - in 1791 alone, he gave three hundred and twenty-eight speeches.Spitting bile and flame in his last speech, which closes this volume, Robespierre truly inaugurates the era when revolution against centuries-old powers brought their end, and their nations found their renewal.

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  This Thing Called You

  Ernest Holmes

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  The inspiration of Ernest Holmes has reached hundreds of thousands of readers through his classic works, many of which are just now becoming available. Whether a newcomer to the philosophy Holmes founded or a veteran listener, you will find great power and practicality in the words that render Holmes one of the most celebrated and beloved mystical teachers of the past hundred years.

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