The Brethren


Book Description

The Brethren is the first detailed behind-the-scenes account of the Supreme Court in action. Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong have pierced its secrecy to give us an unprecedented view of the Chief and Associate Justices—maneuvering, arguing, politicking, compromising, and making decisions that affect every major area of American life.




Brethren


Book Description

The epic first novel in the million-selling Brethren trilogy. In the tradition of Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggulden and Manda Scott, Brethren brilliantly evokes that extraordinary clash of civilizations known in the West as the Crusades. From the burning plains of Syria to the filthy backstreets of Paris and London, Brethren is the story of Will Campbell, coming of age in a time of conspiracy, passion, politics and war. Will longs to become a Knight Templar, but first he must serve as an apprentice to the foul-tempered scholar Everard, a man of dangerous secrets. Meanwhile, a new star is rising in the east. Amir Baybars has fought his way from slavery to become a fearsome commander, driven by an unquenchable desire to free the Holy Land from the European invaders. A stunning, epic novel of war, savagery and heroism.




The Brethren


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • They call themselves the Brethren: three disgraced former judges doing time in a Florida federal prison. One was sent up for tax evasion. Another, for skimming bingo profits. The third for a career-ending drunken joyride. Meeting daily in the prison law library, taking exercise walks in their boxer shorts, these judges-turned-felons can reminisce about old court cases, dispense a little jailhouse justice, and contemplate where their lives went wrong. Or they can use their time in prison to get very rich—very fast. And so they sit, sprawled in the prison library, furiously writing letters, fine-tuning a wickedly brilliant extortion scam—while events outside their prison walls begin to erupt. A bizarre presidential election is holding the nation in its grips, and a powerful government figure is pulling some very hidden strings. For the Brethren, the timing couldn’t be better. Because they’ve just found the perfect victim. Don’t miss John Grisham’s new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM!




The Brethren


Book Description

The first novel in the adventure-filled epic Fortunes of France, one of France's best-loved historical fiction series, now translated into English for the first time The Périgord of 16th century France is a wild region on the edge of the reaches of royal authority. To this beautiful but dangerous country come two veterans of the French king's wars, Jean de Siorac and Jean de Sauveterre, The Brethren-as fiercely loyal to the crown as they are to their Huguenot religion. They make their home in the formidable chateau of Mespech, and the community they found prospers. We meet the fiery Isabelle, mistress of the castle, refusing to renounce her religious beliefs despite great pressure; the petty and meal-mouthed Francois, unlikely heir to the estate; the brave and loyal Jonas who lives in a cave and keeps a wolf as a pet; the swaggering soldier Cabusse; and the outrageously superstitious Maligou, and Sarrazine, who once roamed as part of a wild gypsy band. But the country is descending into chaos, plagued by religious strife, famine, pestilence, bands of robbers... and, of course, the English. The Brethren must use all their wits to protect those they love from the chaos that threatens to sweep them away. A sprawling, earthy tale of violence and lust, love and death, political intrigue and dazzling philosophical debate, The Brethren is the first step in an engrossing saga to rival Dumas, Flashman and Game of Thrones.




The Brethren


Book Description

The dramatic account of a Revolutionary-era conspiracy in which a band of farmers opposed to military conscription and fearful of religious persecution plotted to kill the governor of North Carolina. Less than a year into the American Revolution, a group of North Carolina farmers hatched a plot to assassinate the colonyÕs leading patriots, including the governor. The scheme became known as the Gourd Patch or Llewellen Conspiracy. The men called themselves the Brethren. The Brethren opposed patriot leadersÕ demand for militia volunteers and worried that ÒenlightenedÓ deist principles would be enshrined in the state constitution, displacing their Protestant faith. The patriotsÕ attempts to ally with Catholic France only exacerbated the BrethrenÕs fears of looming heresy. Brendan McConville follows the Brethren as they draw up plans for violent action. After patriot militiamen threatened to arrest the Brethren as British sympathizers in the summer of 1777, the group tried to spread false rumors of a slave insurrection in hopes of winning loyalist support. But a disaffected insider denounced the movement to the authorities, and many members were put on trial. Drawing on contemporary depositions and legal petitions, McConville gives voice to the conspiratorsÕ motivations, which make clear that the Brethren did not back the Crown but saw the patriots as a grave threat to their religion. Part of a broader Southern movement of conscription resistance, the conspiracy compels us to appreciate the full complexity of public opinion surrounding the Revolution. Many colonists were neither loyalists nor patriots and came to see the Revolutionary government as coercive. The Brethren tells the dramatic story of ordinary people who came to fear that their Revolutionary leaders were trying to undermine religious freedom and individual libertyÑthe very causes now ascribed to the Founding generation.




Red Brethren


Book Description

New England Indians created the multitribal Brothertown and Stockbridge communities during the eighteenth century with the intent of using Christianity and civilized reforms to cope with white expansion. In Red Brethren, David J. Silverman considers the stories of these communities and argues that Indians in early America were racial thinkers in their own right and that indigenous people rallied together as Indians not only in the context of violent resistance but also in campaigns to adjust peacefully to white dominion. All too often, the Indians discovered that their many concessions to white demands earned them no relief. In the era of the American Revolution, the pressure of white settlements forced the Brothertowns and Stockbridges from New England to Oneida country in upstate New York. During the early nineteenth century, whites forced these Indians from Oneida country, too, until they finally wound up in Wisconsin. Tired of moving, in the 1830s and 1840s, the Brothertowns and Stockbridges became some of the first Indians to accept U.S. citizenship, which they called "becoming white," in the hope that this status would enable them to remain as Indians in Wisconsin. Even then, whites would not leave them alone. Red Brethren traces the evolution of Indian ideas about race under this relentless pressure. In the early seventeenth century, indigenous people did not conceive of themselves as Indian. They sharpened their sense of Indian identity as they realized that Christianity would not bridge their many differences with whites, and as they fought to keep blacks out of their communities. The stories of Brothertown and Stockbridge shed light on the dynamism of Indians' own racial history and the place of Indians in the racial history of early America.




The Open Brethren: A Christian Sect in the Modern World


Book Description

This book gives a personal insight into the hearts and minds of a fundamentalist Christian sect, the Open Brethren. Using Brethren magazine articles, obituaries, and testimonies, Peter Herriot argues that the Brethren constitute a perfect example of a fundamentalism. Their culture is entirely opposed to the beliefs, values, and norms of modernity. As a result, like other fundamentalisms they challenge modern Christianity and impede its efforts to engage with global society.




Focusing Our Faith


Book Description

A collection of 10 essays on the central beliefs and values of the Brethren in Christ. Each chapter includes discussion questions.




The Plymouth Brethren


Book Description

This is the first history of the Plymouth Brethren, a conservative, nonconformist evangelical Christian movement whose history can be traced to Dublin, Ireland in the late 1820s. The teachings of John Nelson Darby, an influential figure among the early Plymouth Brethren, have had a huge impact on modern evangelicalism. However, the credit for Darby's work went to some of the first generation of his students, and as evangelicalism has grown it has completely ignored its origins in Darby and the Brethren. In this book, Massimo Introvigne restores credit to John Nelson Darby and his movement, and places them in a contemporary sociological framework based on Introvigne's participant observation in Brethren communities. The modern-day Plymouth Brethren emphasize sola scriptura, the belief that the Bible is the supreme authority for church doctrine and practice. Brethren see themselves as a network of like-minded independent assemblies rather than as a church or a denomination. The movement has also refused to take any formal denominational name; the title "the Brethren" comes from the Biblical passage "one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren" (Matthew 23:8). The Plymouth Brethren offers a typology of differing branches of this reclusive movement, including a case study of the "exclusive" branch known as the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, and reveals the various ways in which Brethren ideas have permeated the modern Christian world.




Brethren by Nature


Book Description

In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists' desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip's War of 1675–76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676–1749. When the wartime conquest of Indians ceased, New Englanders turned to the courts to get control of their labor, or imported Indians from Florida and the Carolinas, or simply claimed free Indians as slaves.Drawing on letters, diaries, newspapers, and court records, Newell recovers the slaves' own stories and shows how they influenced New England society in crucial ways. Indians lived in English homes, raised English children, and manned colonial armies, farms, and fleets, exposing their captors to Native religion, foods, and technology. Some achieved freedom and power in this new colonial culture, but others experienced violence, surveillance, and family separations. Newell also explains how slavery linked the fate of Africans and Indians. The trade in Indian captives connected New England to Caribbean and Atlantic slave economies. Indians labored on sugar plantations in Jamaica, tended fields in the Azores, and rowed English naval galleys in Tangier. Indian slaves outnumbered Africans within New England before 1700, but the balance soon shifted. Fearful of the growing African population, local governments stripped Indian and African servants and slaves of legal rights and personal freedoms. Nevertheless, because Indians remained a significant part of the slave population, the New England colonies did not adopt all of the rigid racial laws typical of slave societies in Virginia and Barbados. Newell finds that second- and third-generation Indian slaves fought their enslavement and claimed citizenship in cases that had implications for all enslaved peoples in eighteenth-century America.