Land Of Promise Land Of Tears

It is 1869 and Ole and Helena Branjord are Norwegian immigrants attempting to make a new life on forty acres of central Iowa farmland. Ole is a kind, gentle man who questions his ability to provide for his family. Helena is pining for a real house, but has sadly learned through her past experiences that promises, no matter how sincere, are never certain. But Ole has lofty dreams to prove all the naysayers wrong and double his farmstead. The Branjord children each possess talents and challenges. Eleven-year-old Oline loves music. Martin is intelligent beyond his eight years. Four-year-old Berent wants to wear pants instead of the dresses Norwegian custom dictates he don every day. Populating the Branjords world are other immigrants that include a giant, strong man who can make a violin sing; a Civil War veteran with disfiguring physical scars; and members of the local Lutheran church determined to save their congregation. But among all the good is one enemy from Helenas past who wants nothing more than to destroy the Branjords. Twedts well-researched novel deserves to be awarded a place next to Rolvaag's work on the book shelves of home, public, and college libraries. It is apparent that Twedt has devoted many years to perfecting his craft as a storyteller. Brad Steiger

The author explores the African symbiosis of religion and politics in Namibia. The first chapter describes the collision between the land's first settlers, the Africans, and its second settlers, the Eiropean. Its moral consequence was a horrifying genocide. The second chapter surveys the mix of religion and politics that determined the character of both Africans and Europeans over several generations. European missionaries openly sought to transform the substance of African culture by replacing traditional religions with the biblical faith. The third chapter outlines the process by which a distinctly Namibian ethic has come into being. Unaffected by sectarian tradition that would sharply separate the religious community from the sociaopolitical order, the leadership of the churches found it possible to discern the presence of a divine call for civil justice in worldly affairs. (H221).

A prizewinning historian's epic account of the scramble to control equatorial Africa In just three decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the heart of Africa was utterly transformed. Virtually closed to outsiders for centuries, by the early 1900s the rainforest of the Congo River basin was one of the most brutally exploited places on earth. In Land of Tears, historian Robert Harms reconstructs the chaotic process by which this happened. Beginning in the 1870s, traders, explorers, and empire builders from Arabia, Europe, and America moved rapidly into the region, where they pioneered a deadly trade in ivory and rubber for Western markets and in enslaved labor for the Indian Ocean rim. Imperial conquest followed close behind. Ranging from remote African villages to European diplomatic meetings to Connecticut piano-key factories, Land of Tears reveals how equatorial Africa became fully, fatefully, and tragically enmeshed within our global world.

Legends of the Promised Land is the passionate memoir recounting the forced immigration of a Vietnamese family to the U.S., following the Vietnam war and the rise of communism in their homeland. In her own words, traditional aphorism, and the voices of her children and husband, the matriarch of the family describes her family’s inspirational realization of the American dream, beginning with her lone arrival in the U.S. as a penniless boat person. Xuan-Lan Nguyen tells how for six generations her hard-working family amassed wealth that was all lost when the Vietnamese Communists arrived in Saigon in 1975. Her husband, a well-known lawyer in Vietnam and a seventeen-year prisoner of the Vietnamese Communists, eventually joined her, becoming a writer and orator now living with his family in America. She says proudly, “We have three daughters, now three doctors in the medical field in the U.S.”

Who really killed Lincoln? The value of history is understood less and less in our world. ItÕs an easy subject to underestimate. But the reality is that knowing history is vital to a peopleÕs survival. Creating connections with the past orients and stabilizes us. It provides specific lessons that can inform our decision-making, both individually and nationally. It supplies our memory as a people, as well as our understanding of and appreciation for personal and national character. It fortifies us to face hardships with resolution. And it is extremely prophetic, as it tends to play out in repetitive cycles. The lessons are many, and they are invaluable. What sorts of lessons will this history teach? Will it fill our students with a sense of positive purpose? Will it inspire them to follow the best examples of their forebears and to build heroic character? Will it strengthen them for future challenges? The better you understand history, the better you can understand why our ignorance of it is so dangerous.

Book Two of the Promised Land story, Home and Family, follows the Buechlers as their homesteaded land, "bellies out with life." There is now law and order, co-operation, community, and caring, all of which seems to have appeared with the Buechlers. The family grows and prospers as the land gives them all that they've ever wanted and needed; prosperous farms and businesses, happy homes, intelligent, hard-working children, and herds of healthy livestock. Yet natural disasters, human greed, hate, and power politics continually threaten to destroy all that they've worked so hard to achieve. Is this truly a Promised Land and will it be better for their children? In vivid, evocative prose supported by painstaking research, Promised Land - Home and Family brings history to vibrant, heart-pounding life. It will immerse readers in the courage and ingenuity of the turn-of-the-century pioneers who took on the challenge to carve out hearth and home from the forbidding landscapes of the western Canadian prairies.

This is a novel for you. These episodes are in the past and future times of the lives of mystical ones that are destined to earth as the children of achievement. Although they are scenes for Bloodlines, the video game, they can be enjoyed as a family’s fictional story.