Book Review - period ended 151.2006

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Book Review/Quaker History/Pacifism/Pulitzer Prize/Suzy Wilson's Book Reviews - 20/04/06/ABC Regional Online/Brisbane/Australia/Oceania/20-Apr-06/... March by Geraldine Brooks
Published by Harper Collins
Australian author and journalist Geraldine Brooks has made publishing history by being announced the first Australian to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This win is made possible by her dual Australian, USA citizenship ie you must be a US citizen to be eligible to win.

March, Brooks' invention of the Civil War adventures of the absent father from Louisa May Alcott's classic Little Women, was awarded this year's prize.

In her novel, Brooks takes the character of March, a Union military chaplain, through the war while his wife and four daughters remain at home in Massachusetts. The central moral dilemma of the novel is - how did the Quaker's reconcile their belief in freedom for Negro slaves with the need to fight a war to attain this freedom, when they had deeply held beliefs centering on pacifism. This isn't a book about war, but about the strength of ideas that drive people to extreme action.

Brooks' reaction to winning the prize was "I just can't believe it. It's like being struck by lightning". ...

Book Review/Quaker History/Pacifism/Pulitzer Prize/Aussie interloper joins American literary elite/Australian/Sydney/Australia/Oceania/18-Apr-06/... Brooks, who lives with Horwitz and son Nathaniel in the historic Quaker village of Waterford, Virginia, admitted she had little time for her husband's Civil War obsession until the chance discovery of a Union soldier's belt buckle in the couple's back yard.l ...

Book Review/Quaker History/Pacifism/Pulitzer Prize/Brooks' Pulitzer 'fantasy' comes true/Seven.com.au/Melbourne/Australia/Oceania/18-Apr-06/... "Being a quaker town, where people were ardent abolitionists, but were still enmeshed in the confederacy, that kind of moral decision ... ...

Book Review/Quaker History/Pacifism/Pulitzer Prize/`March' Wins Pulitzer for Fiction, Emerson for Poetry (Update1)/Bloomberg/New York/NY/USA/17-Apr-06/... o Brooks's work is the untold story of fictional Mr. March, the father in Alcott's novel who is known only to be off fighting in the U.S. Civil War.

Brooks said her character was inspired by both the writings of Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott -- a friend and confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau -- and the men of the Virginia Quaker town in which Brooks lives who became the only unit in Virginia that fought for the Union.

Idealists at War

``It got me thinking about idealists at war,'' she said of the pacifist and abolitionist Quaker men. ...

Book Review/Quaker History/Slavery/Dix, Zachariah/The Quaker prophet/News & Observer/Charlotte/NC/USA/15-Apr-06/These reports insist that the Quaker prophet warned of an impending slave uprising and lavishly illustrated his predictions with bloody tales of the recent slave revolt in Saint (Santo) Domingo.

Whatever the exact message the prophetic preacher carried into the South Carolina upcountry in the early nineteenth century, it triggered a massive migration of Quakers out of the Palmetto State. By 1807 almost all the Friends of South Carolina had departed for points north, with the largest group moving en masse to Miami, Ohio. The Bush River Meeting, the Quaker society that had formal supervisory capacity over the entire state by the nineteenth century, was not formally disbanded (or "laid down" in Friends' terminology) until 1822, but for all practical purposes it had ceased to operate by 1807. South Carolina Quakerism, always a small part of the state's surprisingly diverse religious admixture, became truly a marginal phenomenon after the departure of the Newberry County Quakers. Their departure represented the end of a delicate dance South Carolina Quakers had engaged in over the pervious one hundred and thirty years, a dance with a society whose commitment to slavery grew evermore complete. The Quakers of South Carolina, because of their state's peculiarity as much as their own, found religious identity incompatible with their identity as South Carolinians. ...

Book Review/Religious Faith/Abolition/Hicks, Elias/Founding Mother/The New York Review of Books/New York/NY/USA/26-Apr-06/... Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy
by Louise W. Knight

University of Chicago Press, 582 pp., $35.00.....They were Protestant and devout, but not attached to any particular church or sect. John Addams worshiped at whichever local church he preferred at one time or another, and described himself to his daughter as a "Hicksite Quaker." Elias Hicks had been a prominent evangelist and abolitionist Quaker, active in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth; he was famously hostile to putting theological orthodoxy above practical good works. John Addams's self-description was not intended as an invitation to discuss theology but as a reminder to his daughter of the futility of such discussions. Living after the image of Christ mattered; theology did not.

His version of Christian conviction emphasized the importance of being true to ourselves; the sin against the Holy Ghost was to act against our own conscience. Among the theological niceties he would not wrestle with, the doctrine of predestination was foremost. We could make of ourselves what we chose, and we should choose the path of strenuous service to others. Jane Addams absorbed that message. But conscientious self-reliance is a demanding creed, and she spent several miserable years during her twenties wondering what to do with her life. Then in 1889 she found the answer; she opened Hull House on Halsted Street in Chicago, one of the earliest, and by a long way the most important, of the American settlement houses. ...

Book Review/Peace Activities/Fox, Tom//Yesterday's heroes, today's point of view/The Free Lance-Star/Fredericksburg/VA/USA/29-Apr-06/And what qualifies one to be a hero? Was Tom Fox, the Quaker peace activist who was recently captured, tortured and killed in Iraq, a hero for today? ...

Book Review/Change/Raised-a-Quaker/Tyler, Ann/Literary life/Telegraph.co.uk/London/England/UK/18-Apr-06/... So, whether you're interested in her Quaker upbringing or her 'utter lack of faith in change', email AskTheAuthor@telegraph.co.uk. ...

Book Review/Arts/Raised-a-Quaker/Penrose, Roland/Fawning for Britain/Times Online/London/England/UK/23-Apr-06/... Born into a Victorian Quaker family with enormous wealth from banking, he devoted his energies to painting (not very well), collecting (brilliantly), owning a ...

Book Review/AFSC/Youth/Books Building Bridges/Books 'common ground' in war/The Republican/Northampton/MA/USA/18-Apr-06/A celebrated children's author will visit Northampton as part of the "Books Building Bridges" project of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group ...