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From the back cover:
Those of us who knew Charles Rice as
friend and priest give thanks for this renewal of old times not forgotten. Those
who knew him not at all will exult in the wit and wisdom of a new associate,
teacher and playmate.
—Will D. Campbell
In The View from My Ridge, Charles E. Rice
creates short, wonderfully perceptive, lyrical vignettes in the rich story
telling tradition of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.
Sometimes profound, always moving, these
essays by Rice are beautifully crafted. Their intricate designs, almost
always completed on one page, reveal the skill of an extraordinary writer. Here
is a memoir whose form and style, plus the profundity of its meaning, make it a
worthwhile and important read.
—Mary Sue Koeppel,
author of In the Library of Silences, Poems
of Loss; editor of Kalliope
Born in the John Ross House in Rossville, Georgia,
Charles E. Rice lived most of his boyhood at the foot of Missionary Ridge on
the Tennessee-Georgia state line. Steeped in Cherokee culture and Civil War
history, this area becomes a central metaphor in Rice’s much-travelled
life, a life touched by the Great Depression, tempered by World War II, and
challenged by the revolutions that shaped postwar America. Through it all, Rice
struggles to find an enduring truth greater than the shifting values of the
society he so ably served.
—Robert B. Gentry,
author of Insights into Love and Freedom
and A College Tells Its Story
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