Country Ragamuffins

In "Country Ragamuffins," Maxine Bergerson Werner invites readers on a journey back to the 1950s as she recalls her upbringing as the oldest girl among eight siblings in a Norwegian farming community in rural Minnesota. To convey and preserve the experiences, values, and character of a typical Midwestern farm family of the time "before those memories grow dim and finally disappear," the author offers this chronicle laced with humor and appreciation. Werners parents cultivated a lifestyle that combined hard work, learning, and time for childhood fun and play in the surrounding fields, pastures, and woodlands. Connectedness was the theme in their happy life. Every member of the family participated in the functioning of the farm; siblings were best friends; and laughter and debate were welcome at the dinner table. The daily routines, the chores, the holiday festivities, and the births of siblings are recorded in scrapbook fashion.

A young professional family from the Midwest follows God's call to minister in a poverty pocket in northern Appalachia, where their expectations run headlong into the reality of mountain culture. Quirky characters, outhouses, horning parties, cow riding, quilting bees, maple sugarin'they all become part of the fascinating daily life of the Farleys as they work to rebuild a struggling church in a quaint hamlet of Riggs, Pennsylvania. Nothing thrills me more than stories of God working in big ways in small places. This is why Tales of the Endless Mountains is such a treasure! Every page contains riveting adventure, humor, and wisdom, all proclaiming God's amazing grace and power. It almost reads like a fictional account. (How could real life in a country church be so dramatic?!) Woven into the tales you will find boat-loads of encouragement, challenges to enlarge your faith, and superb ministry insightsin fact, more (and better!) advice than many books written expressly for that purpose, which qualifies it for a ministry primer. And, I am pleased that it all happened during the Farleys' years of exemplary service with RHMA! - Dr. Ron Klassen, Executive Director, Rural Home Missionary Association

Since World War II, aesthetic impulses generated in Italy have swept through every film industry in the world, and in her book Mira Liehm analyses the roots in literature, philosophy, and contemporary Italian life which have contributed to this extraordinary vigor. An introductory chapter offers a unique overview of the Italian cinema before 1942. It is followed by a full and profound discussion of neorealism in its heyday, its difficult aftermath in the fifties, the glorious sixties, and finally by an analysis of the contemporary cinematic crisis. Mira Liehm has known personally many of the leading figures in Italian cinema, and her work is rich in insights into their lives and working methods. This impressive scholarly work immediately outclasses all other available Italian film histories. It will be essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the cinema.

Contempt is a brilliant and unsettling work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature. All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous—his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still-striking openness about sex—are evident in this story of a failing marriage. Contempt (which was to inspire Jean-Luc Godard’s no-less-celebrated film) is an unflinching examination of desperation and self-deception in the emotional vacuum of modern consumer society.

On her tenth birthday, Leah receives a surprise gift from glamorous Aunt Olivia, Mama's only sister, who lives in Los Angeles. It is a red rose box. Not many people in 1958 Louisiana have seen such a beautiful traveling case, covered with red roses, filled with jewelry, silk bedclothes, expensive soaps...and train tickets to California. Soon after, Leah and her sister, Ruth, find themselves in Hollywood, far away from cotton fields and Jim Crow laws. To Leah, California feels like freedom. But when disaster strikes back home, Leah and Ruth have to stay with Aunt Olivia permanently. Will freedom ever feel like home?