New Releases by John Howard Griffin

El 28 de octubre de 1959, John Howard Griffin se tiñó de negro e inició una odisea a través del segregado Sur de EE.UU. El resultado fue Negro como yo, quizá el documento más importante que se haya escrito sobre el racismo estadounidense del siglo XX. Tras su publicación, Griffin fue vilipendiado, declarado persona non grata en su pueblo natal, amenazado de muerte y, a finales de 1975, víctima de una brutal paliza a manos del Ku Klux Klan. Pero su valeroso acto y el libro que generó le otorgaron respeto internacional como activista de los derechos humanos. Trabajó con Martin Luther King, Dick Gregory, Saul Alinsky y el director de la National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Roy Wilkins, durante el periodo de lucha por los derechos civiles. "Este es un libro contemporáneo, puedes estar seguro", dice Studs Terkel en su prólogo. En nuestra época, en la que el terrorismo internacional a menudo es relacionado con un grupo étnico y una religión, necesitamos que se nos recuerde que Estados Unidos ha estado antes cegado por el miedo y la intolerancia racial. John Lennon escribió: "Vivir es fácil con los ojos cerrados". Negro como yo es la historia de un hombre que abrió los ojos y ayudó a hacerlo a toda una nación.

In 1969, one year after Thomas Merton''s tragic (and suspicious) death, John Howard Griffin was invited to write a biography of America''s most famous monk, a monk who strangely had become a best-selling theologian. The result was Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton (1983). Both Merton and Griffin were converts to Catholicism, and they had become fast friends during Griffin''s occasional retreats to the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani where Merton was cloistered. As Robert Bonazzi writes in his Foreword, "With natural humility and intense spirituality, they taught each other by example and silence." Merton and Griffin were both photographers as well as writers. Griffin wrote about Merton''s painting and photography in A Hidden Wholeness: The Visual World of Thomas Merton (1970). They also shared a fascination with the French theologian Jacques Maritain, as well as French modernists Pierre Reverdy, George Braque, and Albert Camus. Griffin fell ill before he could finish his biography of Merton, and the mantle of official biographer passed to Michael Mott, author of The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, an essential compendium of the monk''s life. Yet Follow the Ecstasy gets closer to the man—a portrait made by one who shared not only personal histories and interests with Merton, but an "intuitive perspective of solitude."

No less a critic than Clifton Fadiman called "The Devil Rides Outside" a staggering novel. The first novel of John H. Griffin, it written during the authorOCOs decade of blindness following an injury suffered during the closing days of World War II. As "Time Magazine" described it, "The Devil Rides Outside" has some things relatively rare in U.S. letters: energy, earnestness and unashamed religious fervor. Written as a diary, the novel relates the intellectual and spiritual battles of a young American musicologist who is studying Gregorian chant in a French Benedictine monastery. Even though he is not Catholic, he must live like the monks, sleeping in a cold stone cell, eating poor food, sharing latrine duties. His dreams rage with memories of his Paris mistress; his days are spent being encouraged by the monks to seek God. He takes up residence outside the monastery after an illness, but he finds the village a slough of greed and pettiness and temptation. Indeed, as the French proverb says, the devil rides outside the monastery walls."

After John Howard Griffin''s escape from Nazi-occupied France, he was shipped to the South Pacific, where he was stationed as an isolated observer in the Solomon Islands. That experience led to his second novel, Nuni (1956). As in his first novel, The Devil Rides Outside, an American professor is confronted by an alien reality. In Nuni, that reality is a "primitive," almost Neolithic society. Yet, the professor''s intellectual accomplishments are useless here, his place in both family and civilized society meaningless. He learns to cope, not so much in terms of survival as in finding a new meaning to his life. The Chicago Tribune described Nuni as "an extraordinarily interesting account of a white man''s life in a savage island village of the Pacific--the greater part of the novel is concerned with the growth in the narrator, a knowledge of as well as affection for the curiously innocent people." The Dallas Times-Herald wrote: "The two greatest novels of the past decade are William Faulkner''s A Fable, and John Howard Griffin''s Nuni."

This never before published memoir by the author of Black Like Me is an extraordinary chronicle of the triumph of the human spirit.

THE HISTORY-MAKING CLASSIC ABOUT CROSSING THE COLOR LINE IN AMERICA''S SEGREGATED SOUTH “One of the deepest, most penetrating documents yet set down on the racial question.”—Atlanta Journal & Constitution In the Deep South of the 1950’s, a color line was etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. What happened to John Howard Griffin—from the outside and within himself—as he made his way through the segregated Deep South is recorded in this searing work of nonfiction. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity every American must read.

"0n the Street of the Seven Angels in Paris, we find a gathering of humanity''s finest and most frivolous. The Paris bookseller, Charles Edmund Dantes Durand; the liberal-minded, generous monks of a poor Dominican monastery; Madame Culuhac, the personally abstemious owner of the local whorehouse; the Mademoiselle Mailleferre, whose Religious Arts Shop is the headquarters for the newly formed Société for the Preservation of Christian Morality Against Contemporary Indecency; and a host of other finely delineated characters and caricatures. The Société stations a catty collection of spinsters and housewives to spy on their neighbors, resulting in an hilarious citizen''s arrest and a revealing censorship trial that intrigues all of Paris. As Jonathan Kozol writes of this novel, "the literary magic here is in the vivid details. I felt I was back in Paris once again after so many years, and followed the delicious story of Durand (a wonderful creation!) as if I were walking with him through the city""--Jacket flap.

Originally published under the title, Follow the Ecstasy, this book provides an intimate look at the last, critical years of Thomas Merton''s life. This period coincided with the monk''s long-sought permission to withdraw to a hermitage on the monastery grounds of Gethsemani.

On the inhuman treatment of the blacks in Southern State of America; first person account.

One man''s account of the prejudice and racism in the United States.

Comment un écrivain américain s''est transformé en Noir avec l''aide d''un médecin, pour mener pendant six semaines la vie authentique des hommes de couleur. Maintenant le témoignage est là, tangible, solide, prêt à prendre place dans les rayons de toute bibliothèque qui se respecte (Robert Escarpit, Le Canard enchaîné).