Fifth novel from Richard and Judy Award winner Jo Verity, author of Sweets from Morocco a pitch perfect evocation of childhood and sibling relationships" Marcel Theroux A bomb explodes in central London and the shockwaves disrupt the lives of everyone in the vicinity. Australian ex-pat Gil is on a grey gap-year working in the hospital to which Vivien brings Irene for treatment; together they try to bring calm where terror reigns. Irene is thrilled with her new friends, they less so with her ongoing interest in their lives. Gil has a girlfriend, who lives in the same building with her two children, and a family back home. Thirty-something Vivien has a high-flying boyfriend and a time-consuming job which may be about to transfer to Germany. But they keep finding reasons to spend time together in the run up to Christmas. Marooned in Tooting by a sudden snowstorm, Vivien and Gil are forced to spend the holiday confronting secrets and surprises and facing up to... Views: 16
Established by the Catholic Church in 1231, the Inquisition continued in one form or another for almost seven hundred years. Though associated with the persecution of heretics and Jews — and with burning at the stake — its targets were more numerous and its techniques more ambitious. The Inquisition pioneered surveillance, censorship, and “scientific” interrogation. As time went on, its methods and mindset spread far beyond the Church to become tools of secular persecution. Traveling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of Guantánamo to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, the acclaimed writer Cullen Murphy traces the Inquisition and its legacy, showing that not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, but in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever.With the combination of vivid immediacy and learned analysis that characterized his acclaimed Are We Rome?, Murphy puts a human face on a familiar but little-known piece of our past and argues that only by understanding the Inquisition can we hope to explain the making of the present.Amazon.com Review Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Author Cullen Murphy Q: Why the Inquisition—and why now? A: This question gets to the very heart of the book. We’ve all heard of the Inquisition—and we all remember the Monty Python line, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition"—but we tend to think of it as something safely confined to the past, something "medieval" that in an enlightened age we’ve moved far beyond. But that’s exactly the wrong way to think about the Inquisition. Rather than some throwback, it’s really one of the first “modern” institutions. This attempt by the Catholic Church to deal with its enemies, inside and outside, made use of tools that hadn’t really existed before, tools that have only improved and that are part of our lives today.Q: Like what? A: Well, let’s start with what an inquisition is: it’s a disciplinary effort designed to enforce a particular point of view, and it’s built in such a way that it can last for a long time—in this case, for centuries. To last for a long time you need to have some sort of functioning bureaucracy. You need to have trained people—"technocrats," we might call them today—who can run the machinery, and you need to be able to keep training new people. You need to be able to watch and keep track of individuals, know what they think, collect and store information, and then be able to put your hands on the information when you need it—you need what today we’d call search engines. And you need to be able to exert control over ideas you don’t like—in a word, censorship. It’s quite a feat of organization. We take these kinds of capabilities for granted today. With the Inquisition, you can watch them being invented.Q: Go back to the beginning and fill us in—when did the Inquisition start, and why?A: Over a period of about seven hundred years, there were many Inquisitions mounted under Church auspices, and they varied in intensity from era to era and place to place. That said, you can divide the Inquisition into three basic phases. The first of them, called the Medieval Inquisition, is usually given a starting date of 1231, when the pope issued certain founding decrees. It was mainly concerned with Christian heretics, especially in southern France, whom the Church saw as a growing threat. Then, in the late fifteenth century, came the Spanish Inquisition. It was run by clerics but effectively controlled by the Spanish crown, not by the pope, and its main targets were Jews and to a lesser extent Muslims. After that, in the mid-sixteenth century, came the Roman Inquisition, which was run from the Vatican, and was mainly concerned with Protestants. This is a very simplified outline. And all kinds of people were caught up in the Inquisition’s machinery—Jews and heretics, yes, but also witches, homosexuals, rationalists, and intellectuals. Q: How did the Inquisition work? A: In the early days inquisitors would arrive in a particular locale and ask people to come forward to confess their misdeeds or to point the finger at others. Because there was a "sell by" date—anyone who came forward by a certain time would be treated with lenience—a dynamic of denunciation was set into motion. Interrogation was at the center of the inquisitorial process—hence the Inquisition’s name. The accused was not told the charges against him or the names of the witnesses. The questioning often made use of torture. Detailed records were kept. Most of those who came before tribunals received sentences short of death—for instance, they had to wear a special penitential gown for a year or two. But tens of thousands were burned at the stake for their beliefs. In all, hundreds of thousands of people passed through the tribunal process. The psychological imprint on society would have been profound. And as time went on, the Inquisition in some places became a fixture, with its own buildings and with officials in permanent residence. In some places, the networks of informers were complex and dense. Q: Burning at the stake frankly doesn’t seem all that contemporary. Why do you say that the Inquisition is essentially "modern"? A: I’ll start by asking a different question: why was there suddenly an Inquisition when there hadn’t been one before? After all, intolerance, hatred, and suspicion of the "other," often based on religious and ethnic differences, had always been with us. Throughout history, these realities had led to persecution and violence. But the ability to sustain a persecution—to give it staying power by giving it an institutional life—did not appear until the Middle Ages. Until then, the tools to stoke and manage those omnipresent embers of hatred did not exist. Once these capabilities do exist, inquisitions become a fact of life. They are not confined to religion; they are political as well—just look at the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Or, on a far lesser scale, the anti-communist witch hunts. The targets can be large or small. An inquisition impulse can quietly take root in the very systems of government and civil society that order our lives.Let’s think about those tools—the ability to put people under surveillance; to compile records and databases, to conduct systematic interrogations, to bend the law to your needs, to lodge your activities in the hands of a self- perpetuating bureaucracy, and to underpin all this with an ideology of moral certainty. The modern world has advanced far beyond the medieval one on all these fronts. Look at what governments can do when it comes to listening in on private conversations, or what corporations can do to distill personal information from the Internet, or what law enforcement can do on a hint of a suspicion.Q: In the wake of 9/11, torture has certainly made a comeback.A: Yes, it has, and it has done so for the same reason it always does: when the stakes seem very high, and when the people who want to do the torturing believe fervently that their larger cause has the full weight of morality on its side, then all other considerations are irrelevant. If you’re absolutely certain that your cause is blessed by God or history, and that it’s under mortal threat, then in some minds torture becomes easy to justify. The Inquisition tried to put limits on torture, but the limits were always pushed. Thus, if the rules said you could torture only once, you could get around that obstacle by defining a second session of torture as a "continuance" of the first session. That’s how it is with torture—once it’s deemed permissible in some special situation, the bounds of permissibility keep being stretched. There’s always some desired piece of information just beyond reach, and there’s always the hope that one more little turn of the screw will secure it. The Bush administration pushed the limits not only in practice but also in theory. In its view, an act wasn’t torture unless it caused organ failure, permanent impairment, or death. Ironically, that’s a far narrower definition than what the Inquisition would have accepted. The Inquisition understood that torture began well short of that threshold—and if it was reached, it had to stop. Review"Cullen Murphy's account of the Inquisition is a dark but riveting tale, told with luminous grace. The Inquisition, he shows us, represents more than a historical episode of religious persecution. The drive to root out heresy and sin, once and for all, is emblematic of the modern age and a persisting danger in our time."--Michael J. Sandel, author of *Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?"From Torquemada to Guantanamo and beyond, Cullen Murphy finds the 'inquisorial Impulse' alive, and only too well, in our world. His engaging romp through the secret Vatican archives shows that the distance between the Dark Ages and Modernity is shockingly short. Who knew that reading about torture could be so entertaining?"--Jane Mayer, author of* The Dark Side."God's Jury is a reminder, and we need to be constantly reminded, that the most dangerous people in the world are the righteous, and when they wield real power, look out. At once global and chillingly intimate in its reach, the Inquisition turns out to have been both more and less awful than we thought. Murphy wears his erudition lightly, writes with quiet wit, and has a delightful way of seeing the past in the present."--Mark Bowden, author of *Guest of the Ayatollah"When virtue arms itself - beware! Lucid, scholarly, elegantly told, God’s Jury is as gripping as it is important."--James Carroll, author of Jerusalem, Jerusalem "There will never be a finer example of erudition, worn lightly and wittily, than this book. As he did in Are We Rome?, Cullen Murphy manages to instruct, surprise, charm, and amuse in his history of ancient matters deftly connected to the present."--James Fallows, National Correspondent for The Atlantic * "The Inquisition is a dark mark in the history of the Catholic Church. But it was not the first inquisition nor the last as Cullen Murphy shows in this far-ranging, informed, and (dare one say?) witty account of its reach down to our own time in worldly affairs more than ecclesiastical ones."-- Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, former editor, Commonweal* Views: 16
Sebastian and Sara mistakenly descend into a mystical land where elves, mermaids, gnomes and other mythological creatures live. The two discover they have stumbled into an ancient battle between these fair folk and evil creatures called the Kylo. Their guide on this journey is Capri, an elf lord who is on a quest to find his lost tribe. The Kylo chase the children and Capri in his flying galleon north into the Arctic Circle where they find the most unlikely ally. During the final battle the children learn about sacrifice, love and ultimately forgiveness. Views: 16
Before he makes his appearance in The Girl with the Iron Touch, Jack Dandy had an adventure of his very own. Learn how his actions set the plot in motion in The Dark Discovery of Jack Dandy, a short teaser story from author Kady Cross’s Steampunk Chronicles. Jack Dandy didn’t become prince of the London underworld at barely twenty-one by being softhearted, even if a certain girl in a steel corset has wormed her way into his affections of late. He knows how to manipulate, charm and rob people blind. And if his criminal activities embarrass his aristocratic father, so much the better. So when a friend of Jack’s father hires him for an underhanded job, Jack is happy to oblige—for an outrageous fee, of course. Delivering a mysterious crate seems like an easy task—until Jack realizes just what is inside... Views: 16
When you take an ordinary man and train him to kill, he becomes
dangerous. When his mind is clouded by drugs, he becomes unstable. When
he loses everything he loves, he becomes a lethal killing machine. DI
Mike Nash investigates a suspicious house fire, the bizarre murder of a
young drug addict and the disappearance of a scientist's daughter. When
animal right activists lay siege to a laboratory that is later
destroyed, Nash and his colleagues are almost overwhelmed by the upsurge
in violence. Their enquiries point to a man with a burning desire for
revenge. But is he responsible? Or, are more sinister forces at work?
Nash has to penetrate a cloak of secrecy to establish the truth. Views: 16
There are three little words most guys don't want to hear on the first date. Not those...I mean these... "knock me up." This single gal has had enough of the games, the BS and the endless chase. I know what I want most, and it's not true love. It's a bun in the oven, and I'm not afraid to hit up my sex-on-a-stick co-worker to do the job. Ryder is gorgeous, witty and charming — and he's also a notorious commitment-phobe. That makes him the perfect candidate to make a deposit in the bank of me. I won't fall for him, he won't fall for me, and there's no way baby will make three. Right? **** There are four words every guy wants to hear on the first date — "your place or mine?" When my hot-as-sin co-worker makes me a no-strings-attached offer that involves her place, my place, any place — as well as any position — I... Views: 16
A plane disappears over the Atlantic, but after an intense search turns up nothing, the hundred and twelve people aboard are declared dead. Unbeknownst to the outside world, thirteen people survived. After escaping the crashing plane and braving the waters for hours, eleven of them make it to an island. Twenty-seven months later, a plane discovers the survivors. The waiting world is anxious to learn how they lived, but the survivors have secrets they must hide, not only from the media, but from their own families. Will the news media be able to uncover these secrets? Will their families welcome them back? Will the loves and friendships formed in those twenty-seven months last? Views: 16
What should you do when life as you know it ceases to exist, and you don't? Or maybe you do without even realizing it.Olivia Marshall had an idyllic life until it all came crashing down. Literally. Now she needs to save herself from the man who pulled her from the wreckage a decade ago, before he destroys her, dragging her down into his dark, tormented world. She’s taken the first step toward gaining her freedom, and has a plan mapped out for the future. However, when a near accident places Jake McCloud squarely in her path, Olivia decides that delaying her plan may be just what she needs. But when she finds herself falling for the former college lacrosse star, she begins to dream of the possibility of a different outcome, a different life. Can she have that future without acknowledging her past?What was only supposed to be a fun, easy diversion, until she could escape the man and the past that had imprisoned her, could now be her downfall. Olivia Marshall is about to discover that sometimes the easy way, is the hardest way out.About the AuthorRobyn Roze lives in Carmel, Indiana with her husband, two children and one dog. Let's face it. The dog is really a third child and runs the show.In an effort to live what she's preached to her kids, "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life," Robyn decided to begin writing. Something she'd dreamed about doing as a child. The Keeper Trilogy is her first effort at awakening the dreams of her youth, and she continues to live her dream while working on her fourth novel with her ever present 'third child' at her feet. Views: 16
