Stuart Books

I am intrigued by the continuing controversy over Aosdana's election to the office of Saoi of my cousin Francis Stuart, author of Black List. Francis is the cousin I didn't know I had, at least until last year. The family black sheep, the skeleton in the cupboard, he has been the family member that everyone found so hard to deal with that it was easier to deny his existence completely and since the war he has been written out of the family history, both in Burke's 1958 Landed Gentry of Ireland and in their 1978 Irish Family Records. It was not until I found the rather obscure 1930 family history "Three Hundred Years in Inishowen" by our mutual cousin Amy Young (nee Stuart) that I started to fill in the gaps and realised who he was. Francis has said (Irish Times,November 14, 1996, "Nothing But Doubt") that "the Stuart family, however, never forgave Francis's mother and blamed her for Henry's death." That's probably only a partial truth; rather, Henry's suicide shattered the family in ways that have resonated down the generations. The collective failure of the Stuart family, including, but not only, Francis, to integrate the trauma were surely a factor in the 1993 suicide of his and my cousin, travel writer Miles Clark, and so it continues. I confess I read Black List Section H at least in part neither as a literary masterpiece nor as a justification for Francis' wartime actions, but as a family history. Where he writes of how "he'd imagined his cousin Stella coming to his room at night to initiate him into the sexual mystery" I read of my godmother, later Stella Greer, who used to send me 5 quid at Christmas, and was said to be a bit of an old dragon. I presume she was the cousin whose love-letters Francis kept in the pigeon-holes of his roll-top desk at Rugby (Things to Live For (1934) ,page 17) and mentions again on the first page of Black List. And I suspect that, despite two marriages and a divorce, her cousin Francis was in some ways the unrecognised love of her life. I didn't meet her until she was eighty, but as Francis confirms, she must have been young once!

The claims against Francis of anti-semitism are a malicious nonsense. Francis's biographer J.H.Natterstad (Irish Writers series, 1974) notes that "There is no evidence whatever that he saw the Jew as part of an international conspiracy or as the incarnation of evil. Although he was not sympathetic to what he saw as the Jewish obsession with money, the Jew was, as the archetypal outcast, a natural ally and was treated as such in "Julie" (written in 1938, a year before he went to Germany). Natterstad also notes that at Rugby, "There were others, he discovered, who felt themselves outsiders, and they formed their own clique, which insulated them to some extent against the life around them: 'Well, we Irish and a Jew and a Pole,' he recalled, 'we made a little group, and it was good.' " Francis has said that "I have spoken and written several million words in my life. No one could ever point to a sentence of mine that was or is anti-Semitic." In fact he could go further than merely denying any expression of anti-semitism; he has firmly nailed his colours to the mast and they contain nary a shred of racial or other prejudice. The only circumstance in which I could imagine Francis being anti-Jew is if he went to live in Israel, when he would no doubt quickly identify with the downtrodden Palestinians.

But it should be remembered that Francis was not the only member of his family to spend the war in Germany, the other being his cousin's son, my uncle Bob Stewart-Moore. Bob,brought up on the same Queensland sheep station where Francis Stuart was born, and traumatised not by the suicide of Henry Stuart but by the accidental death an elder brother Henry Stewart-Moore, was in bombers, shot down over Germany and,rather than being "passionately involved in my own living fiction", as Francis Stuart claims to have been, spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war at Lamsdorf, some fifty kilometres from Auschwitz. He then walked 500 miles in three months through Poland and Germany in the middle of winter to freedom at the end of the war, eventually being picked up by American troops near Muhlhausen. The group of Australians with whom he was imprisoned recently published a book on the experience, titled "The RAAF POWS of Lamsdorf", which is certainly anything but fiction, and in it Bob recounts the experience of being shot down, crashing in the Elbe canal, getting out of the plane underwater, and being imprisoned by the Germans. Certainly a different way of entering Germany to that chosen by his cousin Francis! One can only hope that the account in Black List of Francis's meeting with a POW at Frankfurt is not a (heavily disguised) description of a wartime meeting with his cousin. The age is wrong, as is the nationality and the rank. In fact the flying boots are about the only thing that is right. But the overtly and quite unnecessarily sexual references he ascribes to Captain Manville are something that this encounter has in common with Francis's descriptions of his cousins Maida and Stella: Are they a device he has used to distance himself from a connection uncomfortably intimate? Do I read too much into this encounter, or are there some subjects too tough even for Francis Stuart's brutal brand of honesty? The Aosdána award seems richly deserved, awarded as it is on literary merit, and I congratulate him on it. But now that he has done the easy bit and made his peace with Ireland and the world, perhaps it's time Francis tried something a little more challenging, and started to reintegrate with his family, starting with Bob Stewart-Moore in Sydney? I would have given Francis a ten for a book that I found to be quite enthralling (and not only for the family connections), but subtract one point for what appears to be his apparent failure to confront this most difficult of issues.

This is a beautifully written book of poetry.Jane Hicks shares my feelings of growing up in Appalachia. She captures the emotions of moving ahead in a changing world without losing your roots. Thank you Jane for this moving and lyrical book.You make me proud to be a"cosmic possum."
Frankie Odiorne

Set in Texas and spanning many years on a international stage, BLood Avenger adresses the political, cororate-power and drug racketeering arena as tentacles of one marauding monster. The novel moves relentlessly en route to a confrontational encounter that states a persuasive case for the relavence of ancient Hebrew law to a modern day society.
That prevailing quality of ruthfulness has a great deal to do with a Mexico-into Texas cartel whose pillar of society members can commit mayhem without a second thought, confident of their own ownership of a corrupt political establishment.Haber's voice varies from first to third person, capturing the the atmospheric and cultural details essential to each milieu
Blood Avenger is a humane and affecting work that draws its greater momentum from preditory misdeeds and intimate tradgedy. A classic roman-noir set-up, in other words, and one that benefits from the author's freshness of approach, his eye for atmosheric detail and ear for conversational dialogue, and his generosity as a storyteller. Mike Price, Entertainment Editor, Fort Worth Business Press

What, out of print? What a shame. Carolly Erickson has outdone herself with this hefty volume, devoted to chronicling the dark side of English history. She fills us in on heartbreaking details of the Tudor family saga, keeps a lively sense of international conflicts; and very nearly creates sympathy for the self-described "unhappiest lady in Christendom" -- whose death was celebrated as a national holiday.

Stuart is one of the best writers around. Period. She creates such vividly complex characters. They are not perfect examples of what we would like to be - some shimmering chimera that does not exist. She picks out characters that are deeply wounded, often scarred, often they are content to turn a blind eye to the world around them just because it's easy than fighting. Sometimes people don't really get Stuart because she is not drawing pictures of pretty characters, she's studying people in all their aspects, good and bad. And she fascinates me like no other writer because of this willingness to dance on the knife's edge rather than play politically correct.

Tanner and Ellie are two more of Stuart's intense dramas. Stuart loved the whole of a person - all aspects, even the ugly, and loves to toy with those, intense emotions when a man and woman are put into a situation that is explosive - between them, around them. Fifteen years ago, Tanners father took a rifle and killed over a dozen people. No one saw it coming; there was no major warning signs before it happened. Tanner and his mother were gone before it happened, though the horrifying act has followed him ever since. He has come back to the scene of the crime, the small Montana town where people died because of his father with the driving need to understand why.

The first person he meets is Ellie Lundquist, the only survivor of his father's massacre. She was wounded in the knee, limps today because of it. After her first shock at who Tanner is, she befriends the troubled man. Ellie is a good person but for too long she was much more than a victim of his father's crime. She was only sixteen when it happened, and as the survivor, the town wrapped her in cotton and protected her like the town princess. Ellie has allowed this to happen because she cares about the people, but she knows this has gone on too long and she must leave the town or die inside.

Tanner is determined to find out why his father suddenly cracked and killed people. His arrival has upset some, since nearly every family in town lost a member in the killing spree. It's a quiet, sleepy small town slowly dying, but beneath the surface is a troubling ripple. Suddenly, animals and pets are being shot in the head; people are reporting someone peeking in their windows.

Ellie knows it's not Tanner, but these are the people she has lover her whole life; she cannot see who would be doing this. Worse, if someone is killing animals now hinting Tanner is behind it, could it be maybe Tanner's father was not the real killer? Or was he the killer and somehow escaped by faking his death?

Tanner and Ellie are wonderfully drawn. They are so human, so mesmerizing. This is just another in the long line of Stuart masterpieces, where she unflinchingly holds up the mirror and forces us to look at emotions that are powerful, that are often disturbing.

Sheer bloody brilliance!

Can't understand why this book is not in stock. It is the follow up book to the best-selling Fountain Pens & Pencils The Golden Age of Writing Instruments. It has all different color photographs (close to 900) and all different information. Has some of the rarest fountain pens in existence and loads of good, useful information.

If you're looking for good ghost stories, with the ring of authenticity and the flavor of Wisconsin, this is a great book. The stories work well out loud. They're good ghost stories, not violent or bloody, but suspenseful and mysterious. There's also a good section at the end on telling stories, as well as notes on where the stories come from.

Booker T. leaps off the pages of this dusty volume and he is a living breathing person. His charisma and energy left me exhausted. One day he is making bricks for his college, the next he is touring New England to raise funds. His wives and friends die of exhaustion around him. I read this book by mistake. I thought it was an assignment for a class(the actual assignment was a thin biography). I took this thick and dusty volume full of footnotes on vacation to the mountains. I decided to skim it and avoid the footnotes. After the first chapter, I read every footnote and the entire volume. These are Booker's journal entries and personal papers. He literally steps out of the pages and you are totally emersed in the beginnings of Tuckaseegee and every aspect of his life. He makes the time and place as real as if you were there. I actually became exhausted by his energy and the mountain of activities he was engaged in at the time. Prior to reading this book, I was not interested in him at all. After reading it, I think he is one of history's underrated characters. This is perhaps one of the most fascinating journals I have ever read on the art of leadership.

A work of imagination, originality, and superb storytelling appropriate for readers from 8 to 80, Books In A Box: Lutie Stearns And The Traveling Libraries Of Wisconsin is the "biography" of a passionate pioneer librarian, who brought books to hundreds of communities in Wisconsin from 1895 to 1914. She traveled alone, defying winter weather and wilderness hazards to bring her libraries to loggers, students, farmers, and families. Her belief in the power of books to change the world was nothing less than inspirational, and she continued to work with the American Library association and write articles advocating social change and education long after retiring as a traveler bringing books. Her life, legacy, and personal triumphs make for a singularly uplifting read. A superbly written novel, Books In A Box: Lutie Stearns And The Traveling Libraries Of Wisconsin is a unique and very highly recommended read, as well as a "must" addition all Wisconsin community library collections!

I love this book (and i'm 30). This is one of my Nieces favourite books (she's 2 yrs old and calls it Boom Bear). Its easy for kids to follow, the pictures are fantastic and the words just flow when you read them, the repetition of words would be great for kids learning to read. All in all i really love this book. A+