Hart Books

Sun Country Elegant takes the reader on a survey of unique and beautiful homes ranging from the Florida Keys to the Big Sky Country. Patricia McMillan showcases every aspect of the home with an informative text that is enhanced with stunning color photography of sun-swept living rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms, baths, kitchens, sunrooms, patios, terraces and gardens. Highly recommended for personal, professional, and community library interior design collections, Sun Country Elegant offers the readers much more than a pleasant browsing through interior design ideas and concepts, it also provides how-to strategies, tips and techniques, as well as resources to make possible any reader's design to emulate what they've seen or use these examples to spark their own creative ideas for interior design and decoration.

The Obedience described by Saint Benedict is based in consensus and discernment of gifts and abilities and callings and weaknesses. Saint Benedict ever calls for consideration for the weak, the elderly, the infirm, and above all that none may lose heart.

In fact Obedience is not a Benedictine vow, but Stability, Poverty and the conversion of ways. Humility is an ideal to work towards assiduously, and the path upon which we travel. The Abbot finds who bears the proper charisma and abilities to bear certain offices and responsibilities, and frees each one in his charge to their true vocation in a process of liberation ("obedient and free" as Father Leclercq here writes) to the spirit. In fact in this book we often read of spiritus libertatis: the liberty of the spirit, or the spirit of liberty.

Thus when military men returned from the SEcond World War to take over our monasteries as seemingly fitting to their customary and severe regime, they had no idea what they were doing and turned monks into their slaves, to take orders without question but with joy. This is not the spirit and the rule of Saint Benedict, who humbly saw his as a rule for beginners, and better to follow that of the great Saint Basil.
With the military regime in place the monastery become not the angelic and liberating path to heaven but a cruel Trap.

Thus this fragmentary record of correspondence reads like an inexorable and tragic novel of opportunities for spiritual growth purposefully and seemingly maliciously and carelessly cut off by ignorant authorities, like something out of Gogol, without the dreamy madness of Kafka, but much as his The Trial, in which incomprehensible and unappealable but grotesquely unjust and life-destroying decisions are made by nebulous and all-powerful absent authorities.

Merton was nearly self-taught as a Catholic, even after his entrance into the monastery, where he read and studied and meditated his reading without end. These letters reveal him at the intellectual and spiritual level of the great European monks of Saint Benedict, but without their rich and deep seed bed in which to sprout and to grow. He had to do it all on his own, at great cost and effort, and unimaginable agony as he confronted the hard wall of the inexperienced and superficial American monastic life, under an unbending military officer, as if in Kafka's The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, an officer moreover with little perception of the true monastic vocation and the way of the hermit, the first and greatest of Christian monks.

Thus his European correspondent can merely stand by baffled at the purposeful destruction and frustration of all of Merton's true and holy monastic aspirations, at the unfeeling and senseless rubbing out of his great vocation. Had Merton been free to live out the vocation God planted in his fruitful heart and soul, for one thing he would still be alive, and for another, so would American monachism. Many observers note his return to Gethsemane took place aboard a military plane, without autopsy, in a closed coffin provided no other monk, in that year of the slaughter of three American prophets of peace. Many draw the obvious parallel to the absurd accident which reportedly killed the great French worker-priest, Father Perrin, SJ.

Whatever be the true cause of his death, whether faulty wiring in a fan as we are supposed to believe, or his public and prohpetic opposition to war in a year in which war was very profitable indeed, preceding this his physical death, were long years of little murders of his true vocation, senseless and against the will of God, as we see so well chronicled in this good book.

Had Merton been a European monk he would have been well trained, well fed, well respected, well educated, and still writing. Instead we find none of this. The loss is ours, and we weep to read it here. The loss is to our Holy Mother Church, who weeps with us, like Rachel for her lost child.

To learn our true and glorious Church, read this book, and see why we cannot have extra-sacramental Oaths of Fidelity which bind will and intellect in obedience to anyone but our God, who is all loving compassion and mercy, who draws all of us home together as one, who commands us to Love one another, not to brutalize, humiliate and rub out, but to support and to encourage in Love.

By the way, early on is mentioned the Abbot of Clervaux, Dom Michel Jorrot, who made the correspondence available and who served as my Pere Zelateur at Solesmes over a quarter century ago, and who was indeed very encouraging. Also frequently mentioned is Regina Laudis (now Abbey) as a frequent site of Father Leclercq's conferences, and where I gratefully lived before and after Solesemes and remain in contact. Please see as well Mother Benedict: Foundress of the Abbey of Regina Laudis. She courageously faced the monastic life and brought it to America, where her Abbey still thrives and gives us hope.

I may have slight quibbles with some of the Latin translations here inserted by the editor, and with the introduction by Abbot Weakland, but this is an extraordinary and powerful work which subtly builds to its ultimately tragic and senseless sacrificial ending, or beginning. At this price you cannot afford not to read this book. I began it after the midnight hour and could not put it down until it was time to go to work, much as the hermit monks of old would read at vigil in their solitary cells. It is long past time to recognize our noncanonical American Saints: Day, Merton, Romero, Chavez, RFK, and the other such of our great PATRIOTIC American and staunchly Catholic heroes and martyrs and Saints.

We must especially dare bring to light the full implications of the passion, suffering and violent death of Father Louis, OCSO, Thomas Merton, and how he brings light and life and hope and peace to us even now in this present darkness. Let this book be a portal to more complete understanding and appreciation and prayer with this great, intelligent, persevering, obedient, brilliant and Faithful saint. Let it also serve as gateway to more complete collections of his correspondence, such as The Courage for Truth: The Letters of Thomas Merton to Writers (The Thomas Merton letters series), and all of his still crucial writings, from The Last of the Fathers: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and the Encyclical Letter 'Doctor Mellifluus' to Cold War Letters.

Tome Mertone, ora pro nobis, filiorum tuorum. Amen.

Notes: The internal page count is 272, but this doesn't include the 30 full color pages. Originaly packaged in a slipcase.

Credits:

Name Credit
Martin Klimes Original Concept and Design
Sean Farrow Original Concept and Design
Damian Miller Producer
Kev Eddy Author
James Elmslie Author
Dave Hankens Author
Andy Jackson Author
Laura Jackson Author
Brian Kendrick Author
Martin Klimes Author
Damian Miller Author
Brett Link Editing
Damon Wilson-Hart Art Director
Damon Wilson-Hart Cover Artist
Damon Wilson-Hart Interior Artist
William Simpson Additional Art
Damon Wilson-Hart Graphics and Photography
Sean Farrow Logo Design
Red Square Graphics Layout
Gervais Roe 3D Telesma Construction

Comments

Martin Klimes (Aug 12, 2004 - 2:58 AM CDT):
I was very proud to be the creator, designer, and editor on this title. Suzerain was a limited run (1,000 copies) of a supremely high-spec book (graphically stunning, in a slipcase. Well done Sean/Damon). It was designed for players looking for something different, and for people new to RPGs, both round the table and live-action. All the feedback was fantastic, and although I have no further project in the pipeline right now, it's still wonderful when I hear from people playing Suzerain. If you have played the game and wish to tell me about it, then feel free to e-mail me. I'm very open to player contact.

All the best,

-M-
Martin Klimes


Moonsson (Dec 6, 2004 - 10:17 PM CST):
I just picked up a copy of this game this past weekend and have been eagerly reading it. All I can so far is "WOW!" I have been an avid role player since I was 10 years old(some 25 years ago) and "Suezerain" is hands down one of the most beatfuily presented games I have ever seen. Also the theme of the game has had me hooked from the moument I read the back of the book in the gamming store. Once again please let me say how well I done I think this game is. I do hope to see more from this game as the moument I am done reading I will be starting a game. I am so looking forward to sharing this game with others.
Thanks for letting me gush.
Ed

Jillian Heart has done it again. Sweet Blessings is about a single mom named Amy McKaslin who is trying to keep the family dinner up and running. One night she is helped out by Heath Murdock, she hires him on as a cook. Heath has his own problems to deal with and they dont included Amy or her son. Will both Amy and Heath learn to put the past behind and learn to love? Or will Heath just be another drifter passing through? I really enjoyed this book, it is another one of Jillian Hearts best stories.

In this collection, Capt. Liddell Hart has gathered selections from some of the greatest warrior-writers in history, from Sun Tzu and Thucydides to Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Clauswitz, and the other theorists and practioners of 18th and 19th century war, to those who waged war in living memory: Churchill, Hitler, Speer, MacArthur, and Mao, ending with a selection from his own work, "Strategy." Included are selections from authors generally not thought of as literary theorists of war, including T. E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), from whose activities many twentieth century guerillas fighting the West derived their inspiration.

The book is a great story of how two vastly different generations developing relationship is reminicint of a time when family was important. What the Publishers Weekly reviewers and others seem to miss is that a story that takes the reader through the developing relationship of Sylvia and Miz Lula Maye. A straight forward story of a child's relationship with a centarian, what an interesting idea. Why do children stories all have to be mystical or fantasy. Why not just tell a story about life. That is what this book does. An authentic voice and good story.

Based on their non-fiction book "Ten Sisters: A True Story" by Virginia Rackley, Deloris Hart, Rhita Brniak, Mary Hickmott, Irma Swierk Allen, Pauline Ariel, Phyllis Ferguson, Vera Barber, Audrey Alford, and Doris Wenzel, Ten Little Sisters is a truly delightful and original picture book about ten female siblings and the enjoyable activities they do together, such as fishing, climbing trees, or visiting a real courthouse. Years later, when they are all grown up they enjoy a grand family reunion in this happy tale with upbeat, crayon-style color illustrations by Lana Hill.

I suspect a microencephalic aardvark has more psychic ability than I do, but I looked at this book to see if there was any help for over-educated but psychically benighted Neanderthals like myself. Unfortunately, they don't tell you know to acquire these esoteric abilities, but for those lucky souls who already possess mental powers far beyond those of us mere mortals, this book is full of interesting tests if you want to test your psychic quotient, so to speak.

C.L. Sulzberger is the best political writer I have yet to read. This non-fiction account is about Charles de Gaulle's re-emergence into power and how he handled the French Algeria crises and that African state's perhaps fated break-up. The book is based on a series of interviews which C.L. Sulzberger had with De Gaulle, as he was somewhat close to that stern and singular leader. It covers a span of about 12 years in just over 200 pages- an incredible accomplishment considering he has pinpointed the important events of causes and effects in that de-colonization. He writes a bit of the secret O.A.S. and the estrangemet felt by the French 4th (+5th) Republican Army, thus giving us insight into the complexities of the matter. Sulzberger does not mince words and has an extremely concise and effective writing style. His handle on political affairs is refreshing, even if it is in regards to events of 40 years ago. You'll finish the book wishing it was longer, for it is aggressively insightful, especially concerning de Gaulle himself, who was almost a mystical embodiment of France, and up against very difficult realities. Really quite an excellent book. I'm very surprized it is out of print. Then again, Algeria is similarly hors de service.