Bøger af Geoffrey Brown

In the 1880s, a Catholic priest in rural Lakeville, Connecticut erected a crucifix on the front lawn of his parish church -- in a predominately Protestant village. Some villagers were enraged. They petitioned the priest to remove the crucifix. The parishioners responded by boycotting the merchants who had signed the petition. The story ran on the first page of the New York Times, and other newspapers all over the United States. Things went rapidly downhill from there. That's the story in a nutshell. It really becomes interesting when you mix in state and national politics, Irish immigration, major changes in the Roman Catholic church, the Puritan history of New England, and a familiar topic today: nativism. Mixed with all of these were unique personalities -- some of national reputation and some not -- who dramatically affected all of the various outcomes. Then, as if by magic, the story disappeared from view. This volume, based on extensive research in primary sources, brings the Lakeville crucifix back to life, along with the background material necessary to comprehend why things happened the way that they did.

Since at least the time of the Romans, people have known organizations by shortened names -- acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations. While motivations for doing so have varied, they have generally included economy of space and ease of communication. In many cases, the abbreviation is more widely recognized than the formal organizational name. This book collects several thousand acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations for organizations, mostly in use in the past two or three centuries and largely within the United States, and provides the researcher with possible meanings for what may, in the beginning, appear to be an indecipherable string of letters that contextually appear to belong to an organization of some type.Also provided for each entry is an attempt at categorizing the organization, since many of these strings of letters potentially refer to a number of different organizations, often of entirely different types. For academic institutions, an indication of location is also generally provided.

The story of life in a great country house, Kingston Lacy near Wimborne Minster in Dorset, during the last eighty years that it remained in private ownership, from 1897 to 1981. Times of glamour, bereavement, sadness and benevolence are recalled through the eyes of Henrietta Bankes and her daughter-in-law Hilary, the estate's last influential chatelaines. Geoffrey Brown, a long-term National Trust volunteer at Kingston Lacy, describes life in the house and on the estate, which extended across Dorset to Corfe Castle and the Isle of Purbeck, with great sympathy and understanding, as its owners responded to the social changes of the twentieth century.To Partake of Tea will delight anyone who has enjoyed visiting Kingston Lacy since its acquisition by the National Trust in 1983, and anyone interested in the predicament faced by owners of other large estates as their role has changed and, in some cases, disappeared.Reprint of a book first published in 2006

In the dozen years since the first edition appeared, there has been a great advance in understanding of the Earth's deep interior.

Can a breakup break you apart?In Self-Titled, Geoffrey Brown stares into a mirror and writes what he sees, what he thinks, what he feels. The result? A self-portrait that's at once comic and psychotic, a complex consciousness captured in crystalline prose. Memories, manias, miasmas Brown morphs the machinery of his mind into an utterly original entity, equal parts diary, criminal confession, sex manual and mash note, as he contemplates a breakup.The novel splits into two parts; in 'First,' our slacker hero analyzes the minutiae of the relationship, trying to understand what he did, why it went wrong, and whether she'll come back. In 'Second' he knows she's not coming back, and he gets angry, flagellating himself with a whip of wordplay and remorse.Self-Titled is a singular achievement with universal appeal: who hasn't squinted into a mirror and said, 'What the hell is happening here?'? If Gertrude Stein's autobiography was Everybody's Autobiography, then Brown's self-portrait is everybody's self-portrait.Guest edited for the press by Derek McCormack.

First published in 1979.