Soul Catcher Journal

College Ruled Color Paperback. Size: 6 inches x 9 inches. 55 sheets (110 pages for writing). Soul Catcher. 157459238012

College Ruled Color Paperback. Size: 6 inches x 9 inches. 55 sheets (110 pages for writing). Soul Catcher. 15750261673

Augustus Cain faces a past he wants to forget, a present without prospect or fortune, and an uncertain future marred by the loss of his most prized possession: the horse that has been his working companion for years. He is also a man haunted by a terrible skill—the ability to track people who don't want to be found. Rosetta is a runaway slave fueled by the passion and determination only a mother can feel. She bears the scars—inside and out—of a life lived in servitude to a cruel and unforgiving master. Her flight is her one shot at freedom, and she would rather die than return to the living hell that she has left behind. In the perilous years before the Civil War, the fates of these two remarkable people will intertwine in an extraordinary adventure—a journey of hardship and redemption that will take them from Virginia to Boston and back—and one that will become an extraordinary test of character and will, mercy and compassion. It is an odyssey that will change them both forever. Soul Catcher is a dazzling tapestry of imagination and character, atmosphere and emotion. Poignant and utterly compelling, it is a story to be savored and remembered.

Mangkunagara I (1726-95) was one of the most flamboyant figures of 18th-century Java. A charismatic rebel from 1740 to 1757 and one of the foremost military commanders of his age, he won the loyalty of many followers. He was also a devout Muslim of the Mystic Synthesis style, a devotee of Javanese culture and a lover of beautiful women and Dutch gin. His enemies—the Surakarta court, his uncle the rebel and later Sultan Mangkubumi of Yogyakarta and the Dutch East India Company—were unable to subdue him, even when they united against him. In 1757 he settled as a semi-independent prince in Surakarta, pursuing his objective of as much independence as possible by means other than war, a frustrating time for a man who was a fighter to his fingertips. Professor Ricklefs here employs an extraordinary range of sources in Dutch and Javanese—among them Mangkunagara I’s voluminous autobiographical account of his years at war, the earliest autobiography in Javanese so far known—to bring this important figure to life. As he does so, our understanding of Java’s devastating civil war of the mid-18th century is transformed and much light is shed on Islam and culture in Java.

There are hot-spots, sink-holes, and hell-holes all over the earth. They move around a bit. Baghdad in Iraq has been often a hot-spot, Kabul in Afghanistan is another. Then there's the sink-hole of Tehran in Iran, together with the recently war-torn Damascus in Syria. Don't blame the places, nor even the folks. New York in the USA, London in the UK, and Brussels in the EU are no different for being sometimes politically-sinking hot-spots or terrorist-targeted hell-holes. In terms of prophetic history, a welter of the world's biggest cities are everyday battlegrounds from which governmental academics compartmentalise their own specialist solutions. Most of these solutions, whether military or civic, fall so far short of the cosmic solution as to escalate the existing state of world disorder. Sure enough, without a barebones history of hell there's no point to fixing up hell-holes. Without the briefest history of heaven, it's also pointless to shore-up sink-holes. And as for the world's hot-spots, you have to look as deep into the souls of the good-guys as you do into the souls of the bad-guys. But you can't just walk off from compartmentalising a problem and expect it to sort itself out. For a workable solution you've got to bring back all the component parts together again that you first took apart and make them work together. That's exactly why this Soul-Catcher's Calling stops at nothing short of dealing with all things both under the sun and beyond the sun. Soul-catching is a military operation, at first under command, and then undertaken entirely by personal commitment. All such tours of duty overseas will be carefully monitored and guided by the most experienced of guardian angels. However perilous the front-line travel, none who seriously commit themselves to this soul-catching operation shall get left behind.

Originally published: New York: Times Books, 1979.

After the death of her son Dan, Kathy Eldon and her daughter Amy created a special book dedicated to all he meant to them. ANGEL CATCHER, a guided journal for people who have lost someone close, gives to others what Kathy and Amy discovered during the years after Dan's death. Its pages are filled with beautiful quotations and original art, but mostly it offers space--to record memories, paste photographs, or draw reminders of the loved one. Color throughout.