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