Creators Books

What's been nailed to the cross? How are the two biblical covenants alike, and do they really differ? This book is a significant study regarding God's covenants. Believing that an understanding of the two covenants can be gleaned from the two Testaments, LaRondelle for the most part looks to the Bible and its history of salvation for an understanding of the unity of the covenants. Despite its subtitle, I found this book to be more than just an introduction. All who are interested in the discussion of the covenants-both scholars and lay readers-will find significance and perhaps a new understanding of the covenants of our Creator Redeemer.

An author, theologian, and expert in the Holy Scripts, John Paul Hozvicka sees to provide the non-specialist general reader with an informed and informative introduction to what the Bible has to teach us in "A Primer On Biblical Studies". The Bible as an ancient body of writings is presented in a context that includes antiquarian writing methods, manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other sources of written records. Readers are also informed on how the canonization of the Bible came about. The apocryphal books that are a part of the Roman Catholic canon but excluded from the Protested canon are explained. Of special note are the chapters on 'The Language of the bible' and Biblical Reference Skills'. Very highly recommended reading for members of all Christian denominations and church affiliations, "A Primer On Biblical Studies" also covers analysis and criticism of biblical literature, the writings of the early church fathers, theology, apologetics, and the chronology of the Bible.

This book offers to humanity a new direction and understanding of creation, life, the universe, and the role of God and Satan. In this material I found a new truth that gives to humanity a sense of comprehending what questions that have always prevailed in the mind's of mankind. Unlike the answers that have come down to man in the past, these answers come from the superior spirits of the Almighty, and not the from man's own cognitive approach to understanding the religions passed from one generation to the next.
The Revelations contained in this book far surpasses the ideas that mankind has reached in the course of religious and human evolution. What can be gained from this book is a better understanding of our universe, science, man's purpose, and our responsibility to each other and God law of love.
The spirits that spoke to the original Message Bearers (the Latvians) gave to mankind a different insight to life and the Creator of all life including God, Satan, and our human spirits. Mankind must read and comprehend these Messages in order to bring about peace, love, and harmony for all humanity.

The story of Samuel Finley Breese Morse explains how a promising tramp painter, who did portraits of John Adams, James Monroe, and the Marquis de Lafayette, became the inventor of the telegraph. Young readers will learn from this juvenile biography by Judy Alter for the Our People series that the catalyst for this unusual transformation was a combination of tragedy and fortune. The former was the death of Morse's wife, which led him to live in Europe for several years, and the later was a conversation he overheard on the boat returning to the United States about electricity traveling in an instant over electric wire of any length. From that idea Morse eventually created the code that bears his name and the invention that made him immortal.

What is most fascinating about this juvenile biography is that Alter gives a view of both Morse the struggling artist and Morse the struggling inventor. Think about it: besides Leonard Da Vinci, how many people have ever achieved some modicum of success in both the arts and sciences? The books in this series usually have informative sidebars in each chapter, and Alter provides one that tells the story of how the great American painte Benjamin West taught the young Morse how to draw. This contrasts nicely with the last two chapters of the book, which covers not only the series of steps by which the telegraph was invented but also what Morse had to go through to sell his invention to the government and the public.

Clearly Thomas Alva Edison is the most important inventor in American history, and while you can certainly come up with other scientist who created more important things than the telegraph (unless you consider Morse is the father of electronic mass communication), you will be hard pressed to come up with an more interesting biography than that of Samuel F. B. Morse. The volume is illustrated with several of Morse's paintings, although neither the "Dying Hercules" or "The House of Representatives" are depicted (the first represents the art lesson alluded to above and the second is probably his most famous work). There are also some photographs of some early electromagnetic devices. Alter makes it clear that Morse was not the only one to work on the telegraph, but he was the first to get it to work and the telegraphic code that bears his name was clearly his own invention.

It is not surprising to come across a person who collects things: stamps, coins, books. No one considers such collecting remotely abnormal, even though a person might get so focused on collecting as to be unable to talk with interest about anything else. Then there are the people who collect erotic items, and that makes alarm bells go off. Of course, the erotica collectors are not as likely to bore us with their collections as, say, Barbie collectors are. For one thing, erotica is interesting to almost everyone who will admit it. For another thing, such collections are usually covert, and for yet another, even though the collectors might be obsessive, they don't get tedious with their stories about their treasures, since they are usually not a topic of conversation. Geoff Nicholson has seen lots of such collections, and gotten the collectors to talk, and reports back in _Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of "Erotica"_ (Simon and Schuster). It's a funny, genial guide to odd (but not sociopathic) people and strange pursuits; Nicholson has seen plenty of eye-popping material, and while he candidly admits that there are some things he has seen that he wishes he could excise from his memory, he does not include such stuff in his descriptions. The book reflects his experience in researching it: "I've seen a great many things that were sexy and fun and beautiful and fascinating, and I wouldn't have missed them for the world." His enthusiastic book is much more about collecting than it is about erotica or sex. In fact, he dismisses the argument about differentiating between what is pornography and what is art by saying that it doesn't make a difference for the purpose of the book; what matters is that someone is collecting it.

Who is doing the collecting? Generally, people with a lot of money, for originals are not cheap and the collections are often extensive. Take Naomi Wilzig, of whom the _National Examiner_ headlined, "GRANNY Proves You're Never Too Old for PORNO!" She enjoys showing the enormous collection in her home, but is having a museum built so that we can all see it someday. Another great collector was Alfred Kinsey, although he is better known, of course, for his interviews and his reports on the sexuality of Americans. "Kinsey believed in data," Nicholson writes, and was trained as a biologist; he collected hundreds of thousands of gall wasps, his specialty, and when he moved into investigating sex, he collected anything having to do with it. Nowadays, "People donate to the Kinsey having reached the stage of their lives when they want to get rid of their collections." Also, police departments donate sex-related materials taken from offenders.
If there are collectors, there must be dealers, although "each considers the other a necessary evil". Some of them enjoy wonderful items going through their hands and being passed on (at profit) with no impulse to own any of them; others buy and sell to make a living, but also to improve their own collections.

There are tales of many other collectors and collections here. Cynthia Plaster Caster has spent decades making plaster casts of famous people's penises, and has branched out into breasts. There's the small collection of lotus shoes, the kind that were worn by Chinese women whose feet had been bound. There's a collection of 80,000 girlie magazines. There is a large group of people who collect erotic book plates, and commission them. Nicholson eventually helps us realize that we are all sex collectors; we may not look for something to put on our shelves, but we do, if health and opportunity allow, amass sexual experiences. He also comes to the conclusion that he is a bit of collector himself, not necessarily of the type of item the more generous of the collectors profiled here sent him away with, but a collector of sex collectors, an activity that has involved such familiar endeavors as finding interesting examples, doing negotiations, lucking out on good finds, and other things that collectors here do. His is a unique collection, and it is generously shared in a breezy, amusing book.

Rather than a biography, this book contains 8 interesting essays:
1. Dr. James Moriarty
2. Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud
3. The Chemical Corner
4. Points North
5. Thomas Stearns Eliot and Sherlock Holmes
6. Sherlock Holmes and Arsene Lupin
7. The Origin of Sherlock Holmes
8. Conan Doyle and Spiritualism
Index of Cases
index of Names, Places and Publications
First-rate scholarship on Sherlock Holmes!

Bellavia again delivers a wonderful message of love and acceptance across boundaries of being "different." He does so in a warm, friendly, and non-preachy way. If only this book were available in every kindergarten class in the country, we'd have a great deal of hope for a new generation.

Father Brown appears in only one story, "The Donnington Affair", which does NOT appear in _The Complete Father Brown_. Don't be fooled by the poetic qualities of Chesterton's writing - as a charter member of the Detection Club, G.K. can set a puzzle as well as anyone when he puts his mind to it. His personal quirks, some of them unlovely, appear in a few of these stories, so that one can cheat a little towards a solution, knowing how Chesterton's opinions on certain subjects are likely to affect the development of the story; regarded purely as puzzles, though, they're quite clever.

"The White Pillars Murder" features 3 detectives - the great criminologist Adrian Hyde and his two junior assistants John Brandon and Walter Weir. This story alone would be worth the price of the book; it hasn't been collected much, and can be fiendishly difficult to find. Most of the story follows Weir and Brandon doing the legwork, with Brandon in the sidekick role. Chesterton does a beautiful job here.

"The Tremendous Adventure of Major Brown", "The Singular Speculation of the House Agent" - These are the first and fourth stories from _The Club of Queer Trades_, and are best appreciated in an edition of that book including Chesterton's original illustrations (which aren't included in _13 Detectives_). Briefly, the 2 Grant brothers encounter in each such adventure someone who qualifies for membership in the club - that is, who has invented a brand-new profession - under various suspicious circumstances. Rupert, the professional detective, parodies Sherlock Holmes, charging around jumping to all the wrong conclusions; Rupert's older brother Basil (drawn as a self-portrait by the author) figures out, in the end, what's going on. The Grants' narrator, incidentally, isn't counted as one of the 13 in this collection.

"The Garden of Smoke" features Mr. Traill, formerly of Scotland Yard. The viewpoint character, however, is Catharine Crawford, just starting a new job as companion to the poet Mrs. Mowbray. (Few of Chesterton's stories have a woman in the lead role - see also 'The Moderate Murderer' in _Four Faultless Felons_.)

Horne Fisher appears in two stories, each time with a different sidekick. "The Hole in the Wall" is one of Chesterton's country house mysteries - Prior's Park, in this case, in the district of Holinwall. (The origin of the names is covered at the beginning of the story.) Like the Father Brown story 'The Red Moon of Meru', he makes a point of mentioning whether a house is actually stolen property, from Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. (Chesterton converted to Catholicism as an adult, and was eloquent on the subject.) "The Bottomless Well" is one of Chesterton's stories set in one of the Empire's eastern possessions, where a dead man isn't found *in* the great pit of the title - but *why* wasn't he?

"The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse", "When Doctors Agree" - These are the first and third stories from _The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond_. Mr. Pond, as suggested by his name, is a very quiet, mild person (in fact, he *is* a government bureaucrat), but there's more beneath the surface than first meets the eye. Like flashes of fish in a pond, odd, apparently contradictory statements sometimes appear in his conversation, when he tries to compress an odd experience into one or two sentences. His friends then have to drag the story out of him. :) The details of presentation differ from story to story, but all are organized as stories-within-a-story, wherein one of Pond's paradoxes must be explained. If this appeals to you, see also _Four Faultless Felons_, wherein each story's focus is a different paradoxical character.

Gabriel Gale appears in two stories. "The Shadow of the Shark" In "The Finger of Stone", the great scientist Boyg - some sort of high-powered authority on the process by which fossils are formed - is missing and presumed dead; Boyg's former servant Bertrand joins Gale as one of the 'detectives' working out what happened to the old fellow. (Given that evolution vs. creation science was one of Chesterton's hot buttons, one needs to keep one's eyes open during this story.)

"The Donnington Affair" - In 2 parts, the first by another author setting up a challenge for Chesterton to solve via Father Brown in the second half, which may explain why it had previously been overlooked for the 'complete' Father Brown collection to date. It does not appear in any of the individual collections (The Innocence/Wisdom/Secret/Scandal of Father Brown).

This book is faith building and worth every dime you will pay for it. His legacy continues with the care of many orphans in Romania.

This title has been revised and edited several times because more and more information has been learned about each of A.A.'s Twelve Steps. The author has been the first and only person to look at each Step and the research and report on the various sources and ideas that contributed to the idea of that particular step. You are told how to take the Steps in accordance with the suggestions of the Big Book, and also how to look at each step with far greater understanding because you will know how certain ideas developed and what they really meant--for example, God as we understood Him, came to believe, the unmanageable life, the surrender, the inventory, the confession, the conviction and conversion aspects of Steps 6 and 7, the why and what of 8 and 9, and how it is that Steps 10 through 12 are really the "continuance steps." Each has an historical root and an historical purpose. And you'll know much more about their imperative part in any continued practice of the Step principles in your life.