Bøger af David Claire Jennings

What does it mean to be an American in the sense of the United States of America? Is there anything special or extraordinary about our nation and its people? There is perhaps an impetus to search the past for these things and contemplate the present in this age where grace and graciousness are nearly non-existent. Some of the answers are in this third edition now expanded to eighty seven essays and stories. There is a mix of contemporary and historical narratives. The essays are grouped in categories - society, bureaucracy, history, law, politics, economics and literature as art. For so many years I wrote essays, long before I wrote novels, before I went back to school to study history and study it further on my own. Before that I wrote technical manuals and instructions. Inexplicably, few read those, while they are needed for some practical purpose. But essays - narrations of ideas - have always been at the heart of my writing, even when infused within my characters and their stories in my novels. So here then are my essays, with some more recent in my years as an old student with passion for history and its people. Some, the most early, are not so well written - it was before my appreciation for the English language grew to its present level - and maybe weakly compelling, while a few show a spark of intelligence with profundity and maybe wisdom. There is a little bit of memoir, some painful but honest and personal. Some are now outdated but reflect what I saw at the time. They are my own words.

Slaves, Saints and Soldiers is the trilogy of three historic fictional novels previously published - After Bondage and War, Hanna's Promise: A Story of Grace and Hope and The American: A Man's Life. The stories overlap so that any one may be read on its own and the three in any order. But here they are together in one book - a trilogy. All three stories are different. All three are love stories. The cast of characters grows as their family members are born and pass on. The lives of the Wexleys, Taylors, Ashfords, Drishs, Blanchards and the McAuleys intersect and are intertwined through the 1800's and into the 20th century. Cruelty is overcome and kindness and forgiveness brings these human lives together after a century of strife.

What happened to him the thirteen years after he disappeared to go west, before his casket brought him back to Cincinnati on the train? He had not found a settled life, or even what he was looking for, not even by the time he was fifty five in 1887. He saw the worst of it and it affected the rest of his life. Men had talked to him about glory. He had heard about it and dreamed about it when he had gone to be a soldier. Ever since man held a spear and fashioned a sharp-edged weapon, he longed for glory. Homer wrote of it epically and he read it. He believed in it but learned that glory is a false God in the end. Those years he was a man in the Gilded Age but not of it. Others were making fortunes by nefarious means. He was still trying to sort out the troubled past - to make what meaning he could out of it and get by. America had disappointed him and there was little source of solace. The great men he had known, or known of, had made his country as bad as they had good. For many it looked like America wasn't a country; it was a business. There was the economic Panic of 1873 resulting from government patronage and abuses in the Union Pacific railroad development. There was carryover debt from the Civil War and troubles with bonds and paper currency. The efforts to tie all this economic lunacy to the soundness of gold had failed too. He was a man of little import in the greater scheme of things - a man of great courage and heart who cared for his fellow beings and made what little difference he could. He was a man of his time who tells us his story in the first person voice. He saw, thought, felt, believed what he experienced as it affected him and his country. He was an American.