Evan S. Connell explores the quixotic obsession with the new, the hidden, the unattainable that burns in an individual's soul.Each essay is an extraordinary account of passionate pursuit by legendary explorers, visionaries, and seekers compelled by a singular desire. Here we find Marco Polo, El Dorado, Paracelsus, Columbus, the thousands of children in the Innocents' Crusade, Magellan, Mary Kingsley (a Victorian naturalist, ethnologist, sailor, scholar, and guest of cannibals, and ...

God wills it! The year is 1095 and the most prominent leaders of the Christian World are assembled in a meadow in France. Deus lo volt! This cry is taken up, echoes forth, is carried on. The Crusades have started, and wave after wave of Christian pilgrims rush to assault the growing power of Muslims in the Holy Land. Two centuries long, it will become the defining war of the Western world.

Evan S. Connell's Mrs Bridge is an extraordinary tragicomic portrayal of suburban life and one of the classic American novels of the twentieth century.Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her children to be pleasant, clean and have nice manners. And yet she finds modern life increasingly baffling, her children aren't growin...

Arising out of The Third International Symposium held in New Jersey, this book represents the state-of-the-art in ocean management. From the Baltic to the Caribbean, from the Adriatic to the Atlantic, the problems of ocean management are fully discussed, and proposals made to meet the challenges of the next decade. This book will be of immense inte

Here are tales of fabulous advances made in anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, and linguistics, stories of the Anasazi, the "old ones" of the southwestern desert, of the great explorers, eccentrics, dreamers, scientists, cranks, and geniuses. "There's no end to the list, of course," Connell says, "because gradually it descends from such legendary individuals to ourselves when, as children, obsessed by that same urge, we got permission to sleep in the backyard."

The companion novel to Mrs Bridge, this is a pitch-perfect portrayal of marriage and family life and a poignant dissection of the unexamined life.Walter Bridge, husband to India and father to three, is a successful lawyer in a Kansas suburb. The dailydramas of his life only serve to illuminate his narrow prejudices and complacent outlook, yet he is also troubled by existential doubts, dark undercurrents of desire and a yearning for something forever out of his reach...

Never has master storyteller Evan Connell been more enthralling than in these incandescent pages - tales of real-life adventure ranging from the archaeology of Olduvai gorge to the exploration of the Antarctic; from Viking voyages to an Ice Age xylophone. Never has reality so far surpassed mere fiction or fantasy than in this magnificent volume.

Does God want everyone to be saved? Does man really have a choice regarding salvation? These significant questions are among the many John S. Connell, doctor of theology, educator, and Southern Baptist pastor, answers in his new book,The TULIP in the Garden: Pruning the Petals of Calvinism.Dr. Connell presents his ideas and resolutions regarding the growing popularity of Calvinism in seminary classrooms and Southern Baptist congregations in an accessible, succinct, and flo...

Son of the Morning Star is the nonfiction account of General Custer from the great American novelist Evan S. Connell.Custer's Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history--more than one hundred years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as "one of our most interesting and intelligen...

Acclaimed author Evan S. Connell sends us through the complete experience of a man initially intrigued and then enslaved by art: a curious interest, a rapt fixation, and the becoming of a connoisseur. The Connoisseur trails the evolution of Muhlbach, an insurance executive on a business trip in Taos, New Mexico, who develops an obsession with pre-Columbian figurines after meandering through a curio shop. Entranced yet bewildered by his sudden affinity for a little figurine, Muhlba...

Mr. & Mrs. Bridge is the saga of a clean-cut, "upper-class" couple who increasingly find their post-WWII world and traditional belief systems challenged by a changing society. For Walter Bridge, an ambitious lawyer, and his wife, whose focus is her household, affluence and material comforts create a cocoon of community respectability that cloaks the void within. Mr. Bridge is dominated by reason and common sense but is vaguely aware that something is missing from his life. Mrs. Br...

A magisterial work of historical imagination-a stunningly immediate, first-person account of one soldier's experience of the defining war of Christendom.