John Sanford

Softcover, 304 pages ISBN: 0-87685-825-6 1991 $14.95   Vol. 5—The Season, It Was Winter Softcover, 328 pages ISBN: 0-87685-757-8 1989 $13.95   Vol. 4—A Walk in the Fire Softcover, 304 pages ISBN: 0-87685-713-5 1987 $14.95   Vol. 3—A Very Good Land to Fall With Softcover, 296 pages ISBN: 0-87685-671-7 1986 $13.95 Hardcover, 296 pages ISBN: 0-87685-672-5 $22.95   Vol. 2—Waters of Darkness Softcover, 304 pages ISBN: 0-87685-643-1 1985 $16.95 Scenes from the Life of an American Jew: Memoirs by John Sanford Vol. 1—The Color of Air In his five volume epic autobiography, John Sanford once again juxtaposes reminiscence with documentary material--not only brief, lyrical bio-vignettes on earlier American heroes and heroines, but also excerpts from personal letters, diaries and transcripts of court testimony--to build an impressive mosaic of the past recaptured, giving back full multi-dimensional vividness to history by returning it to the intimate field of experience, registering through his unique prose construction method that elusive quality of vanished time which he himself has aptly termed "the color of the air." For all his reliance on the distancing elements of fact, record and assemblage, it becomes increasingly clear as Sanford's critically acclaimed work reaches its conclusion that the method is as personal as any other major writer's. "Whether we know it or not," he himself recently suggested, "we all draw on ourselves for what we've seen, done, heard, imagined; on our stock, our savings, and we use it till it's gone."   Softcover, 304 pages ISBN: 0-87685-614-8 1984 $13.95   Winters of That Country: Tales of the Man-Made Seasons by John Sanford Hardcover, 286 pages ISBN: 0-87685-578-8 1975 $22.95   A More Goodly Country: Personal History of America by John Sanford In A More Goodly Country, one of our best writers has achieved a feat of imaginative re-creation unprecedented in our literature, a personal history of America as accurate as any formal history. The uniqueness of this "personal history" is in John Sanford's writing in so great a variety of voices astonishing in their authenticity - voices of the American character, beginning the in A.D. 1000 with Leif Ericson and ending with the atom bomb, which opened the most significant era in our history. Across this long range of time, the American spirit is depicted in Mr. Sanford's re-creation of virtually every great figure and many little-known persons as well as the significant places and events in the American saga. There are pages of marvelously fluent prose, of tall story and dialect rendered with knowledgeable accuracy, of lampoon and satire, of the vernacular of the various regions of America; at times the language rises to magnificent poetry, heroic or humorous or permeated by folklore, all skillfully designed in style and period to depict the essential meaning of each of the subjects and the major men and women - writers, poets and painters as well as statesmen, military figures, rebels, etc. - significant in the historical development of the nation. And though it exposes the rapacity, the cruelty, and the self-righteousness, the insensate assumptions of superiority over other colors or creeds - the forces that have vandalized the bright pageant of America's historic hopes - Mr. Sanford's long unfolding panorama presents essentially an optimism and hope in the eventual fulfillment of the original American spirit. One realizes at once why Carl Sandburg described an earlier work of John Sanford's as "a sacred book, majestic in its rebukes of those who violate the breath and origin of humanity..."