Bøger af Steve Sherwood

Acting as himself in his essays and as various protagonists in his stories, the author shows us a hunger for a vanished world of natural splendor and ideal love. The essays are persuasively strong, rising to a thematic climax in the powerfully reasoned "Environmentalist as Misanthrope." As for the matching antiphonal stories, they delight with their surprise endings and several-"The Swimmer," "The Bright Side," "Assassinations" -may best be described as small masterpieces. Both the essays and stories that comprise Field Guide share a feature I call "page richness," a literary quality that causes the reader to savor certain pages before continuing toward the conclusion, as one might pause on a long journey to enjoy especially appealing vistas. Writers either have this ability or they don't. Steve Sherwood has it.

A mysterious woman comes out of the wheat fields late one night to complicate the life of Chief Ranger Aldo Springer, recently banished to Fort Pawnee National Historical Site in central Kansas. She demands asylum and backs up her demand by threatening to jump from the highest point in the historical site-a crow's nest halfway up the hundred-foot mast of the fort's flag pole.

In a post-modern world leery of abstracted theology, might the answers to the deep question of why Jesus died on the cross be found, not in theology textbooks, but in the stories of the Bible? What if the playing out of one Hebrew word, hesed, tells us who we are, who God is, and what Jesus' life and death were all about? Embraced: Prodigals at the Cross tells the story of hesed, God's steadfast love, as it weaves its way from our creation for relationship, through our rejection of that relationship, to God's centuries-long pursuit of reconciliation. The story ends in embrace, the embrace of a good father who runs to his prodigal son, and a loving God who takes on human flesh to reach out to us on the cross. This book is God's story. This book is our story.

Hoback flees to Wyoming to escape the big city violence that cost him his wife and almost turned him into a killer. Life is good in Hardwater until somebody butchers three people like deer, packs their bodies with uranium ore, and sends Hoback a poem, challenging him to stop the killing.