reviews of Awe

On the evening of4 May 2008, I delivered a speech in my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, entitled "A Citizen's View on the State of the Union." A number of people who heard me speak asked if I would post my remarks so that they could share them with friends.

I have posted "A Conversation with Scott Russell Sanders," which was conducted by Carolyn Perry and Wayne Zade and was published in the spring 2007 issue of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion. Perry and Zade--whose earlier interview with me, Something Durable and Whole," appeared in The Kenyon Review in 2000--posed the most searching questions I've encountered about the links between spirituality, politics, and art in my work. You will find this recent interview here.

A Private History of Awe, published in a cloth edition by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in March 2006, came out in a paperback edition in March 2007. To read my short description of this book, click here.

Three of my earlier books have been brought out in revised editions by The Wooster Book Company— Wilderness Plots, a collection of brief tales about the settlement of the Ohio Valley; Warm as Wool, a storybook for children about a pioneer family; and Aurora Means Dawn, another children's storybook, this one about a family from Connecticut that homesteads in the Ohio wilderness in 1800. Ask for any of these books at your local bookstore or contact The Wooster Book Company online at www.woosterbook.com or by phone at 800-982-6651.

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"In Warm as Wool," so the dust jacket says, "Scott Russell Sanders encourages us to understand history as he does, by imagining past lives. He was fascinated by a fragment of information that he found in a nineteenth-century record book, about the first pioneer to own sheep in Randolph Township, Portage County, Ohio. The pioneer was a woman, Betsy Ward. Her story has inspired this one, and Helen Cogancherry has illustrated it with deeply affectionate, richly textured scenes that show the promise of opportunity, the hardships that seem to keep coming, and the strength of a mother’s love. Offering a vivid picture of life on the frontier, Warm as Wool is intimate and emotionally involving. Superb storytelling and artwork bring us the past afresh while inspiring our appreciation of the vital and largely unsung role women have played in our nation’s growth."

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From the dust jacket of Aurora Means Dawn: "With bold strokes of color and detail, Scott Russell Sanders and Jill Kastner offer children a rich opportunity to participate imaginatively in history. Focusing on the hopes and hardships faced by one family, they provide a story that echoes the experiences of countless pioneers—men, women, and children—who left their homes in the East to travel to largely unknown and unsettled lands. On the Ohio frontier in the early 1800s, with help from folks in a neighboring village, the Sheldons began a new settlement, which they called Aurora, the Latin word for dawn. There are many towns and great cities across America that arose, like Aurora, from such hopeful beginnings. This resonant picture book gives children a vivid, personalized understanding of how our nation came to be."

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And here's the publisher's note about the other reprint: "Wilderness Plots is made up of fifty brief tales that chronicle the period of settlement of the Ohio Valley, roughly 1780 to 1850. Beginning with the 'discovery' of the Ohio River by La Salle and ending with the Civil War, this region was the West, the exciting new frontier. Written with the power and compression of folklore, these tales bring to life the unmemorialized common folks who carried out this epic adventure.

"In these pages, you will meet preachers and profiteers, the boy who saved Cleveland, a love-crossed carpenter, generals and journalists, a hermit and a lawyer, farmers and bone collectors, lovers, layabouts, and a host of other high-spirited characters—the kind of people who, in all ages, have made history.

"These stories, which condense entire lifetimes into single paragraphs, come out of a distinctive tradition in American literature. For this book reflects the experience of settling our entire wild, raucous, dangerous, and glorious continent. Our ancestors went through very much the same trials everywhere, from New England to California and Alaska. They wrestled with the land and its inhabitants for more than two centuries before there were any cities or industries to speak of, and since we have all been shaped by that prolonged wrestling, this encounter with the wilderness is one of the deepest, truest, and most abiding subjects in our literature."

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Over the past year, five Indiana singer/songwriters—Carrie Newcomer, Tim Grimm, Krista Detor, Michael White, and Tom Roznowski—composed and recorded an album of songs inspired by Wilderness Plots. The CD was released on March 1, 2007. Here's a site devoted to this dazzling album and to the corresponding show: http://www.myspace.com/wildernessplots.