Clark Books

The author tells a painful story of a betrayal in his own life that left him devastated and without the wife he planned to spend the rest of his life with. This is a beautifully written book and a very easy read. If you've ever been falsely accused of something, you will truly appreciate reading this man's experience.

My five year old son loved doing his devotion time. He would ask to do them at all hours of the day!! Fun activity with each devotion.

I've used this book as a resource for teaching about slavery in an elementary school class. The thoughts conveyed are not the usual rhetoric presented in most lower level school social studies texts. Until recently children have not been exposed to the idea that slavery existed in parts of the world other than the USA. The long history of slavery - in the world and especially in Africa itself is new to many people. We learn much about slavery that has not before been related to school children, if not adults. The children in my classroom have been very absorbed by the thoughts presented in these pages. This is a must-read for Middle or High School students studying Aftican American history. As a teacher I would be sure to use it in my class.

Writer L.D. Clark has more than a touch of the mystic about him, and it glows between the lines of this handsome coming-of-age novella.

The protagonist, 15-year-old Bruce, as young people that age often do, is fascinated by the story of his great-uncle, Jerome, who vanished after being acquitted of murdering the twin brother he killed during a quarrel over a young woman. Now, after having all but been given up for dead, Jerome has wired he will attend the annual Christmas gathering at the family homestead after an absence of half a century.

What follows is a penetrating and tightly controlled story of how one young man has his first serious brush with mortality and adulthood, told without any hint of moralizing. Mr. Clark has captured the flow of family interaction with consummate skill, with all its eddies and undercurrents. He also hasn't forgotten what it's like to be a boy trembling on the knife edge of becoming a man, and his portrait of Bruce is both empathetic and unblinking.

There is a bit of a resemblance between BITTERSWEET CHRISTMAS and James Agee's compelling A DEATH IN THE FAMILY as the members of the extended Coldthorpe family deal first with the impending arrival and then the sudden death of the clan's notorious black sheep. The contrast between the dark past and the gaiety of a family holiday celebration is deftly balanced, flavored with a hint of ghostly mystery that Mr. Clark wisely allows to go unresolved.

This is a superb little tale, full of all the things that make life the rich experience it is and peopled by a family that embodies all the contradictions such a unit can. It is a perfect gift for a reader, at Christmas or any other season.

This volume includes a transcription of Clark Ashton Smith's "Black Book", a notebook in which he kept story ideas and plot germs, invented names, story titles, possible content tables for story collections, and so on. This makes for fascinating reading, as it reveals the author's creative process at work, with variants on the finally published stories, unused ideas, and so on. There are also a number of CAS's poems in draft form, along with the final versions -- and several of these are among his best. Also included are some interesting memoirs of meetings with CAS. All in all, this is an essential item for CAS fans.

I had the honor of having Dr. Clark as a professor at George Mason University. What seperates his work from a lot of others is that he just doesn't argue his point but shares it with you and challenges you to use your mind and think. A great read.

Lorraine Clark opens her comparative study of Blake and Kierkegaard by describing two acts of renunciation. As she understands it Kierkegaard's act of withdrawing from his engagement to Regina did not work out in the way he secretly hoped. He had somehow imagined that the reward for his renunciation would be Regina restored. It did not happen .Regina married almost immediately afterwards, and Kierkegaard was left with himself and the creation of his works of genius. Blake's renunciation had to do with his friend and patron Hayley who wished him to compromise and succeed in the world of commerce. Blake suffered a three year withdrawal and depression but in the end renounced the 'compromise' and went on to create his last great prophetic works. Both these renunciations Clarke sees as rejections of 'compromise' and affirmation of a deeper creative integrity.
In another central comparison Clark considers the way Blake and Kierkegaard contend with what she calls the 'spectre of dialectic'. She considers the way Blake and Kiekegaard in parallel contend with the skeptical naysaying elements of Mind and Self. Blake's Spectre of Dialectic' and Kierkegaard's Concept of Dread are compared and elucidated. And we are helped to more deeply understand these two great rebellious and yet deeply religious spirits,
Clarke is an excellent writer who makes complex ideas clear and understandable.

What a great little book. Filled with inspirational stories. It will make you smile and laugh. Easy to read. Would be a excellent Christmas gift.

If, like me, you have painful misgivings about centers of power dominating our history, namely, religion, science and humanism, this is a book you must read. Clark teases a quite amazing concerted illuminative action from the work of such seemingly exclusive figures as Heidegger, Proust, Balanchine, Antonioni and Hawking.And in pressing their insights into concrete historical action, he introduces undreamed of realms of problematicness and joy.

At twelve years old, Jack Riggs was a bully who on his first day at a new school beat up Mark who later became his best friend. Living with an alcoholic father toughened him up even as it made him afraid to go home. He loved history and spent much time dreaming about living in nineteenth century Tennessee. One day he and Mark were exploring THE NEW CUT, a man made deep gouge in Brian's Creek, when eight years old Billy, whose mother had the New Cut created starts following them. Suddenly the Cut seems to keep going on and on.

When they leave the gorge they find a cabin without electricity or other amenities and the family who lived there gave them food and shelter that they were supposed to "pay" for by doing chores. Mark and Jason run away from them but are captured by the land pirates and forced to bait a flat boat into an ambush that turned into a massacre. The pirates are the infamous Pikes and their minions, a ruthless group of cannibal murderers. Billy, who got separated from them, meets an Indian Willawick wearing Nikes. The boys try to figure out how to get the Indian to take them out of 1811 and back home but first Jason and Mark have to find a way out of the cave that is the pirate's headquarters which is surrounded by a blood thirsty militia.

This time travel fantasy is also a coming of age tale in which the protagonists realize that history is romanticized and reality is more gritty, dangerous and ugly. Jason learns how to make decisions for his little group and to have more tolerance for people, especially those that don't want to kill him. The authors have written a delightful work that will appeal to young adults as much as the older crowd.

Harriet Klausner