Ocean State Libraries

Based on stories and sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne, on Thomas Morton's New Canaan, and on Herman Melville's Benito Cereno.

On May 2, 1919, Hesse wrote to Romain Rolland: "I have had to bear a very heavy burden in my personal life in recent years. Now I am about to go to Ticino once again, to live for a while as a hermit in nature and in my work." In 1920, after settling in the Ticino mountain village of Montagnola, he published Wandering, a love letter to this magic-garden world that can be read as a meditation on his attempt to begin a new life. His pure prose, his heartfelt...

For many Americans, the tragic events on the campus of Kent State University on May 4, 1970, passed into history with Attorney General Mitchell's refusal to convene a federal grand jury to investigate the deaths of the four students. But, as this passionately and cogently argued book shows, the Nixon Administration's non-action is an outrage against justice, as disturbing in its way as the shootings themselves. The events of that day were recorded...

Thomas Merton wrote The Silent Life a decade after he took orders. In his Prologue, Merton describes the book as "a meditation on the monastic life by one who, without any merit of his own, is privileged to know that life on the inside ... who seeks only to speak as the mouthpiece of a tradition centuries old." It is a remarkable work-one that combines a lucid and informative description of the nature and forms of monasticism, communal and solitary,...