FEATURED AUTHOR - D. Lynn Robinson is a mom of five and has been writing fiction all her life, and publishing novels since 2019. A lover of the outdoors, she enjoys hiking, swimming, and warm sandy beaches. When she’s not in the water, you can find her horseback riding with her husband Joe on one of the many trails Idaho has to offer. The Last Indigo and the Beast of Epicerra is her first fantasy chapter book, and a project deeply important to her. She believes that great stories have the power to enrich lives…
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Recent comments: User reviews
Or could her predicament be far, far worse?
This tale is well worth the 15 minute read.
Craig Alan Loewen
http://literary-equine.livejournal.com/
Then you will understand the value that the waters in Buxton, England were given as they were believed to have curative powers that may or may not have been a simple placebo effect.
For history buffs and historical writers interested in the end of the Victorian era, this little pamphlet is valuable for its perspective into a world and age long gone.
Craig Alan Loewen
http://literary-equine.livejournal.com/
Personally, it reads like Monty Python wanted to do a satire of Lovecraft's Necronomicon and failed miserably.
Did residents of London in 1920 actually talk that way?
The storyline is of mild interest. Uncle Daniel Davis has returned from South America to help out his widowed sister and her five children, inspiring them to work hard. He claims that having only a few years left to live, he will leave his vast fortune to the one who demonstrates achievement and success through hard work.
However, Uncle Daniel may have something else up his sleeve.
Reading the script, the language to this reviewer appears stilted. It may have been that Coward wanted to be trendy so uses what was for that time popular figures of speech, but to the American ear, I suspect it sounds stilted and rather pompous.
With its simple sets, if the dialogue and setting are modernized, it would make a nice play for a nonprofit or educational institution seeking an easy and entertaining amusement to fit into a fundraising program.
Craig Alan Loewen
http://literary-equine.livejournal.com/
Barrett-Murrer's Five Jewels of Wisdom is an attempt to fuse several ideologies together as a cohesive whole, particularly Buddhism and Christianity, claiming there are universal truths that can be found in both worldviews. Though I agree there are some extremely rudimentary basics such as the Golden Rule, Barrett-Murrer bases his entire treatise on the doctrine of karma which no serious scholar of comparative religion would claim exists even as a secondary thought in Judeo-Christianity.
And reincarnation in Christianity's linear timeline—as compared to Hinduism's and Buddhism’s circular timeline—simply cannot fit.
I accede for the sake of argument that in today's atmosphere of supermarket relativism, we can simply ignore historical realities and declare that truth and the interpretation of specific religious worldviews is simply left up to the individual to define, but then we must follow that conclusion logically and simply say the same about Five Jewels of Wisdom which would make its perusal of little value.
I appreciate Barrett-Murrer's work as an interesting glimpse into another worldview, but I would encourage the reader to remember “caveat emptor.”
In 1920, Lewis became the president of Freethinkers of America (a title he would keep for the rest of his life). He later started his own publishing company, the Freethought Press Association, where he published literature about freethought written by himself and others.
The Tyranny of God (1921) is your typical anti-theist (notice I did not write atheist) screed that deals with the question of why there is evil in the world and why evil is done in the name of God and addresses them in a manner as if Christians have never dealt with these questions for two millennia. Using the fallacy of argument by outrage, this little pamphlet is a good exercise for study by Christian apologists as the topics have already been dealt with by countless Christian philosophers and thinkers and there are no new aspects to Lewis’ arguments.
However, my hat is still off to Joseph Lewis for his honesty about his philosophy. Like Nietzsche and Camus, Lewis knew and freely communicated that without the existence of an Absolute, life has no intrinsic meaning and the only logical conclusion is despair offset by one’s relationships with others (for Lewis it was his relationship with his wife).
Arguing from Lewis’ point of view (and a worldview that this particular reviewer does not share) why you would want to submerge the world into despair instead of finding comfort in a theological delusion is a purpose beyond my own understanding except that possibly “misery loves company.”
Though the horrors of two World Wars dampened the growth of the movement, it still has its adherents today.
The Heart of the New Thought, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) is an interesting work for those interested in the origins and philosophy of the New Thought Movement.
Wilcox’s blend of liberal Christianity mixed with universalism and reincarnation is a fairly good representative of the New Thought movement of the day. New Thought was also strongly feminist and had little patience with Orthodox Christianity which is mirrored in Wilcox’s rather strong comments against New England Christianity that almost border on the level of a rant.
This book is actually a transcript of a speech given before a crowd in Portland, Oregon on September 10, 1912 and is a denunciation of capitalists, judges, the Supreme Court, and the clergy (one gets the impression Darrow didn't like a lot of people), and a call for the abolishing of the U.S. Constitution: "It needs abolishing worse than anything else."
Why? Because Darrow believes it was put together by men who were mostly farmers and knew nothing about industry and the future social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution.
Darrow uses a lot of sarcasm in his speeches and they do not translate well through the written word. This reviewer has no idea what he thought of Theodore Roosevelt and it is unclear if Darrow liked the man and his progressive policies ore was merely being sarcastic.
The stories gathered by Cyrus Alder and Allan Ramsay are a conglomeration that come from all three world views. Though the tales by today’s standards are highly racist and bigoted, they are quite reminiscent of the Arabian tales told by Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights with a fantastical magic all their own.
Craig Alan Loewen
http://literary-equine.livejournal.com/
In this novella, an international incident is created when an alien spaceship crashes into Boulder Lake interrupting a major government project turning the area into a managed wildlife resort. Everybody flees except for a surveyor named Lockley (oddly enough we are never given his first name) who returns to base camp to rescue Jill Holmes, a journalist who stayed behind to locate her fiancé.
As the alien invaders wield their terror ray over civilians and military alike, Lockley and Holmes attempt an escape from the area only to discover that the story of the alien invasion is more complicated and far more stranger than what they originally believed.
An exciting tale from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Operation Terror will not fail to entertain and mystify.
Craig Alan Loewen
http://literary