THE SEARCH AND THE SECRET

A value-d Holiday Gift for the youngsters in your life…

THE SEARCH AND THE SECRET

By Dr. James M. Gifford
CEO, The Jesse Stuart Foundation

            How much do today’s young people know about traditional American values?  Don’t you wish they knew more? 

Well, here’s a chance to read them in on perhaps the most important thing they’ll ever learn.  Via a book that’s both a great story for teenagers and a ringing reaffirmation of the values that guided a great people in building a great nation.  I refer to…

            AMERICA: The Search and the Secret, by James N. Sites

            Here is an inspiring story about a young man called Sonny growing up in a Tom Sawyer-like setting along the Ohio River.  The location: The heartland area where Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia come together.  A 10-year-old refugee from Depression-devastated Pittsburgh, he discovers here a unique dedication to such grand values as hard work, strict raisin’, tough schooling, neighborliness, the “old time religion” and love of family, home and country.

These values prove a lifelong, indispensable guide for Sonny through the modern moral wilderness.  [As they can for ALL teenagers, now as then!]

            His guiding stars: The Bible, Boy Scout Handbook, McGuffey’s Fifth   Reader and his frayed American history text with its world-shaking documents on mankind in a free society.

At 16, Sonny also meets (and falls madly in love with) a very human guiding star – a beautiful neighbor who urges him to turn aside from commonplace goals and strive to become a “Four Dimensional Human.”  This is an intensively developed person with knowledge, cultural awareness, spiritual depth and an abiding concern for others.

            The book makes many other sharp points, too:

 

            …Beware of today’s Media/Entertainment Complex with its incessant emphasis on permissiveness, pornography, perversion and promiscuity.   America could well be committing cultural suicide.                                                                                                                          

            …Abandoning children to the modern media message madhouse  is  like throwing them to the wolves.

            …Unless you develop a strong inner world, you fall easy victim to the crass outer world, pushed around like a leaf in a hurricane.

            …Beware of politicians promising government help.  The bigger government gets, the smaller people become.

            During Sonny’s decade-long journey of discovery, he survives the Great (Ohio River) Flood, hunger and a bout with a rattlesnake, gets baptized in the river, wrestles with death and prepares for war.

            The “secret” in the book’s title?  The answer lies right in the title itself:  It’s SEARCHING.  Aided by his teachers and neighbors, Sonny finally comes to realize that as long as one keeps learning and seeking answers to life’s mysteries…and exploring  ways to grow and develop one’s capabilities and understanding to the utmost…life can become vital and fulfilling, regardless of age.

             About the author: Astute readers may already have concluded that Sonny’s story is the author’s own.  Indeed, this book is a true autobiographical novel.  Also, the beautiful neighbor Sonny falls in love with (Chapter 11) just happens to be modeled after the author’s wife, Inger – the heroine of Mr. Sites’ most recent book, INGER! A Modern-Day Viking Discovers America (also published by JSF Books).    

            The two books, taken together, provide unique insight into the lives of people who had their roots in the ebullient 1920s, who survived the hardships of the 1930s and the dangers of WWII, and who then participated directly in the immense changes that the postwar period brought to America.

            Publisher’s note: America: The Search and the Secret is published at $22. but is being offered at HALF-PRICE, or $11., as a special Holiday Gift for young readers.  Please add $6. for handling and shipping, for a total of $17.  Order from the Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1645 Winchester Avenue, Ashland, KY 41101.   Phone: 606/326-1667. Or go to JSF Books.com

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