||boek: The sparrow||A Black Swan Book

||door: Maria Doria Russell

||taal: en
||jaar: 1997
||druk: Black Swan Edition reprint
||pag.: 506p
||opm.: paperback|like new

||isbn: 0-552-99777-3
||code: 2:000224

--- Over het boek (foto 1): The sparrow ---

A visionary work that combines speculative fiction with deep philosophical inquiry, The Sparrow tells the story of a charismatic Jesuit priest and linguist, Emilio Sandoz, who leads a scientific mission entrusted with a profound task: to make first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. The mission begins in faith, hope, and beauty, but a series of small misunderstandings brings it to a catastrophic end.

[source: https--marydoriarussell.net/novels/the-sparrow]

Reviews of The Sparrow

One of 1996's ten best novels. --Entertainment Weekly

Important novels leave deep cracks in our beliefs, our prejudices and our blinders. The Sparrow is one of them. --Rating: A. Entertainment Weekly

The soul-searching nature of the story of The Sparrow, combined with Russell's incredible grasp of narrative structure and control of character development, make this novel an experience not to be missed. --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Extraordinary... And what about the Jesuits specifically? In so many ways, the author gets us right, in our attitudes, our training, our activities, our spirituality. How she does this, I do not know... An utterly fascinating story, a book that is hard to put down. --John W. Padberg, SJ, Jesuit Spirituality

A biography of belief... Russell describes much in the lives of individual Jesuits and the order itself with uncanny accuracy and deep affection. --America Magazine

The novel's prose is exceptionally well-crafted, the characterization exceptionally detailed, the climax exceptionally moving, but it is nevertheless a conscientious science-fiction novel which does not skimp on its careful description of how an interstellar expedition might be mounted. Nor is it in any way a comforting book... Even those who approve of its moral conclusions... will inevitably find much to unsettle them along the route by which those conclusions are attained. The Sparrow is, in essence, a challenging book-which is, in my view, the best kind. --Brian Stableford, Interzone Magazine

An extraordinarily tough-minded novel that challenges the very nature of religious belief... Russell has managed to achieve stunning effects with a first novel. --Locus

Beautiful, sometimes unsettling, always thought-provoking. --Cleveland Plain Dealer

A startling, engrossing, moral work of fiction. --Colleen McCullough, New York Times Review of Books

A brilliant first novel. Kirkus Reviews

The Sparrow is out of this world ... deeply humanistic science fiction ... fascinating narrative suspense ... compelling characters ... An intelligently constructed first novel that makes us wonder! --Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered, National Public Radio

Character and style and theme ... all come together seamlessly ... an extraordinarily assured grasp of science, and of the things that science cannot tell us: things of the heart. --NY Review of Science Fiction

Powerful and ambitious ... Tackles a difficult subject with grace and intelligence. --San Francisco Chronicle

An ingenious and haunting tale... Even when humans venture into space, Russell reminds us, we will continue to struggle with questions of God, the difficulties and ambiguities of human relationships and the hubris that casts the Other into the outer darkness. --Commonweal

An unusual kind of speculative fiction, challenging the heart even more than the mind ... harrowing and strangely beautiful. --Christian Science Monitor

A fast-paced yet thought-provoking book that will linger in the reader's mind weeks and months later. --Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

[source: https--marydoriarussell.net/novels/the-sparrow/reviews]

Insight from Afar
An Interview with novelist Mary Doria Russell
From the National Jesuit News

Though the thought of Jesuits exploring space may raise a few eyebrows in the provincial's office, the idea seems quite natural to anthropologist - turned-novelist Mary Doria Russell. Her 1996 novel The Sparrow tells the story of a Jesuit-led expedition to make contact with the population of a world circling the three suns of Alpha Centauri. The story begins with the expedition in ruins and gradually untangles the complex series of events leading up to the disaster. In a recently published sequel entitled Children of God, Russell explores the aftermath of first contact both on Earth and on the other world, Rakhat.

Russell converted to Judaism from agnosticism during the time she was writing the two books. Her faith transition is evident not only in the Jewish characters in the book but also in her treatment of religion as a whole.

The two books offer an intimate view of both the interior life of the Jesuit characters and their interaction with others. The characters experience joy and hope, anguish and desperation, and then attempt quite explicitly to make their experiences fit into their faith-inspired world view.

The success of that intimate view belies the fact that Russell's only contact with the Society prior to finishing the first book was "driving through the campus of John Carroll university on the way to synagogue every week." A draft of the novel was read in the final weeks before publication by Father Ray Bucko, a Jesuit anthropologist who teaches at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York. Russell met Fr. Bucko via e-mail after finding his Jesuit Resources page on the internet.

Widely read by Jesuits, both The Sparrow and Children of God offer an interesting view from the outside of life on the inside of a Jesuit community. Russell discussed the writing of the two books in a recent interview with Matthew Paschke, NSJ, a Jesuit novice from the New England Province who was working at NJN this spring.

What follows is the full interview, part of which was published in the June 1998 issue of NJN.

How did you choose to write about priests, and why the Jesuits in particular?

This all got started in 1992, which was the 500th anniversary Columbus' landing in the New World. The first thing that came to me was the notion of trying to update the experience of the explorers and the early missionaries and the settlers. At the same time it was announced that down at the Arecebo telescope and around the world they were beginning a concerted effort to monitor the sky for radio communication in hopes of picking up evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

I began to think about what we would do if we actually heard something. If we really got evidence that was not iffy, that was definite. What would we do? What would it be like? Then I asked the next question, which was, if it were possible to get there within a single human life span, who would go? So, I was looking around for an international organization with scientific expertise and a motive to go, and it occurred to me that the Jesuits have a 500-year history of having done this kind of thing for a living.

So, it's more important that he's a Jesuit than a priest?

Yes. It just seems to me that this is something that is in the tradition. The other thing I thought was interesting, is that from everything I have read about modern Jesuits, there is not a lot of proselytization, but there is a lot of missionary work. You go out and you do the work, and if anyone asks you, "Why do you do what you do? Why are you here? Why have you spent your life this way?" you're very happy to explain it to them. But there's not the idea that you should go out and see how many people you can baptize this year.

I also think the opportunity to do first contact right would be interesting, and it would be something that would motivate Jesuits. The notion that you have seen how things can be damaged and how dangerous it can be would lead Jesuits to want to analyze that, and then try to do it right the second time. It just seemed like, to me, an interesting idea.

Is there a particular incident in Jesuit history that caught your attention?

I used Ricci. I loved his book. One of the reasons that I know about the Jesuits is that as an anthropologist I come across Jesuit ethnography in my work. The ethnography tends to be very thorough and very sympathetic. There is a real respect for the belief systems in situ, and I think an admirable hope to share what these men really believed about eternal estrangement from God and eternal closeness to God. I think they showed a very good balance between respect for what they found and an eagerness to share what they had.

What's your experience of the Jesuits, and the Society as a whole?

My only connection with the Jesuits prior to writing this book was that I drove through the John Carroll University campus on my way to synagogue.

You have said that you had very little contact with the Jesuits before writing the books. How did you come to know the Society?

Autobiographies. In the last thirty years, the Catholic Church has lost 100,000 priests, and many individual priests have found it helpful to write autobiographies that explain what drew them to the priesthood, what the satisfactions were, what the frustrations were, and why they either stayed or left. I also read the sociology works that had been done.

The other aspects of this project were that I know academic politics, I know corporate politics, because I worked in business, and I know family politics. For Jesuits, all that happens in the same building. I just figured that I had enough understanding of what it's like to have to work in those three areas, and then collapse it into a single area. For Jesuits, it's all happening in one room, sometimes.

Along the same lines, you captured the interaction among Jesuits very well. What did you use as the source for that interaction?

It's guys. You guys are not that hard to figure out. You want someone who's hard to figure out, I'll introduce you to my mother sometime. I just got this from a reporter in Florida who was reading the book and said that I just get male interaction so well, and I'm delighted to hear that. I just have a lot of guys in my life whom I really love. I have a wonderful father, and a terrific husband and a great son, and I am just very comfortable with men. I just figured it was guys who were also academics and scientists and have jobs and stuff. And yet, underneath all of that, there's a central core of spirituality that from what I have read and from what I have learned from just being friends with Jesuits, doesn't often surface.

How large a role did people like Ray Bucko have in your research of the book?

None in the research. I had finished the book, and it took 18 months to find an agent. I was turned down 31 times. Within eight weeks of finding an agent, I had a publisher. I realized that it's not just between me and my computer anymore. I had to get someone inside to take a look at this. I had had physicists read it, I had had astronomers read it, I had had anthropologists read it, I had had engineers read it, I had had just folks read it. I didn't know any Jesuits. So, I opened up the paper the Sunday morning after I had a publisher. There was an article in the religion section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer on the Vatican Web site. Religion on the Internet. It gave the address for the site. We got on to see what was there, and there was a hot button to the Jesuit home page. I clicked on that, and there's Ray Bucko's name at the top. The guy is an anthropologist. He is running a newsletter with a Lakota co-editor. I'm already 15 chapters into the sequel. I have a Lakota Jesuit character. So, I sent him an e-mail message saying "I have written this book, and it's about - don't stop reading - Jesuits in space. And it's going to be published. Would you read it first?" And he wrote back that it sounded terrific, that he'd love to.

We only had to change a few things. I used the word seminary. I knew that it was really formation, but I thought, lay people, they're not going to get it. But his attitude was that I taught them about Rakhat, I taught them about the aliens. I was introducing a lot of words they don't know. "Get this one right," he said, "explain it, work it in." So, people now know it's formation.

The other thing I had wrong, and I fixed this one by taking a paragraph out, was that I had a sense of tension between the Society and Islamic countries. But he said, "No, we have a long history of very good relations with Islamic countries. That's just not on." So, I took that out.

[source: https--marydoriarussell.net/novels/the-sparrow/national-jesuit-news-interview]

[2014-09-05]

JESUITS IN SPACE AND IN THE VATICAN by Mary Doria Russell was originally published in September-October 2014 issue of Health Progress, the journal of the Catholic Health Association of the United States.

Old joke. A Franciscan, a Dominican and a Jesuit are having dinner one night. Suddenly the lights go out.

The Franciscan says, "Let us welcome Sister Darkness and wait patiently for Brother Sunlight to return."

The Dominican says, "God gives us the darkness of ignorance so that we might, by contrast, discern the light of truth."

The Jesuit gets a flashlight and goes downstairs to flip the breaker.

• * *

I'm not a Catholic, but that's the kind of practical, pragmatic "just do it" attitude that brought the Jesuits to mind on 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the New World.

On October 12, 1992, a serious Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began at the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico. I asked myself, What would happen if we really heard something? What if we picked up incontestable evidence that there were other sentient species in the universe? And what if it were possible to go there? Who would attempt the mission?

It would take an international organization with scientific expertise, the money to back the mission, and a compelling motive to go. What about a group with a 500-year history of making first contact?

What about the Jesuits?

During the Age of Discovery, Jesuit priests were never more than a year or two behind other Europeans making initial contact with previously unknown peoples; indeed, Jesuits were often the vanguard of exploration. And what could be a more compelling motive than the desire of Jesuit scientists to know and love God's other children? So that's how my science fiction novels The Sparrow and Children of God got started. They're about Jesuits in space, making first contact with God's other children on an alien planet.

Fast-forward 22 years.

When the stunningly improbable papacy of Francis was announced, I got congratulatory emails from readers around the world, as if I had somehow predicted this turn of events.

Actually, I had predicted an African pope, not a South American, and my Gelasius III certainly wasn't a Jesuit. I try to keep my novels realistic. Jesuits sometimes serve as bishops in what used to be called mission lands; in old age, esteemed Jesuits have sometimes been raised to the cardinalate. Those are exceptions to the rule. Jesuits actually take a vow to forgo ecclesiastical dignities. A Jesuit pope wasn't impossible, but it was about likely the mayor of Toledo, Ohio, going straight to the White House.

Fiction has to be plausible. Real life? Not so much.

And here we are in the real-life future, when the College of Cardinals has elected a Jesuit pope whose predecessor was choppered into retirement at Castel Gandolfo. Which, in case you were wondering, is not actually named after a Tolkien character. Trust me on that. I do a lot of research for my books.

The papacy of Francis is so astonishingly unprecedented, it seemed apocalyptic to some of the Church's more excitable children. There are those who believe St. Malachy prophesied in 1143 that Pope Francis will be the last pontiff. They're pretty convinced that the end of the world is nigh, but years have passed and the apocalypse tarries.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis has enthralled the world much as the current Dalai Lama has over the years: simply by being a manifestly nice guy. Good-natured. Humble. Compassionate. Funny and self-deprecating.

Francis carries his own suitcase, remarking, "It's normal to carry a bag when traveling! We have to get used to this being normal for a pope." The world swoons.

Francis turns down the lavish, if lonely, papal apartments in favor of a perfectly nice room in the Vatican guest house where he can share meals with others. The world smiles.

Francis removes from office Germany's notorious Bishop of Bling, who spent $43 million renovating his mansion. Prelates around the world are shamed into giving up lavish digs. The world applauds.

"It breaks my heart," Francis says, "to see a priest or nun with the latest model of car. Cars are necessary, but take a more humble one! Think of how many children die of hunger." The pope's own ride is a Ford Focus. The world sighs with admiration.

Asked about homosexuals in the clergy, Francis replies,"If a gay person seeks God, who am I to judge?" The world is amazed. Seriously? Did he really say that? Wow.

Francis publicly embraces people with severe disfigurements and deformities. "He is teaching us about looking at the Other as Jesus looks at them: with tenderness, kindness and love," says Jean Vanier, founder of an international federation where people with and without disabilities live and work together in community. The world wipes a tear from its eye. What a guy!

According to the Pew Research Center, positive comments about Francis outnumbered negative ones on the Internet by 5 to 1 during his first year. This pope is a rock star and he's got the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine to prove it. But as his papacy goes forward, Francis will have to lift things heavier than his suitcase.

"Women in the Church are more important than bishops and priests," he has declared, "just as Mary is more important than the apostles." That's nice. Mother's Day is nice, too, but respect year-round is better. And what about divorce? Remarriage? Birth control?

The Church, Francis says, "must act decisively to root out and punish pedophile priests." Measures must be taken "to protect minors and to help those who have suffered violence in the past." Okay, but will records be turned over to police? Are priestly pedophiles going to do time? And what about the cover-ups?

Sometimes the devil really is dancing in the details. There are decades, if not centuries, of scandal that can no longer be hidden. The breathtaking evil perpetrated by Marcial Maciel Degollado and the Legionaries of Christ has been luridly exposed. The glaring hypocrisy of clerics who preach celibacy while practicing promiscuity has been uncovered, filmed and broadcast on PBS, no less. The corruption of the Vatican bank, and the involvement of the members of the Curia in Mafia money-laundering, is oozing into the light.

Historically, revolutionaries fare better than reformers. Rip the past away and you can leap into the future while people are still gasping at the speed of change. Reformers, by contrast, chip away at the past, bit by bit. Reformers give those who fear change plenty of time to prepare opposition and to counter every move. Meanwhile, those who yearn for decisive change are disappointed. Fond hopes and expectations are dashed. Cynicism sets in.

We'll cut Francis some slack for now, the world decides. But the question remains: can this personable, good-hearted pope bring about genuine reform or just... rebranding?

Another question, equally important: will the world's admiration for Francis go beyond fandom? As St. Ignatius Loyola, founder to the Jesuit order, wrote, "Love in action is preferred to love in words." To put it plainer: talk is cheap. What are you prepared to do?

There is a long and honorable Catholic tradition of preference for the poor, the sick, the despised. It started with Jesus of Nazareth and has been carried on, generation after generation, by those who take his teaching seriously. To date, Pope Francis has directed much of his scolding at Curia careerists and Vatican hypocrites, but there have been clear signs that he will become insistent about drawing the world's attention toward the beam in its own eye.

Already, he has decried rampant consumerism and the modern "throw-away culture." He has denounced unbridled capitalism, "the idolatry of money," and "the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose." Perhaps some people have made quiet changes in their own lives in response to the Pope's calls for social and economic justice. Maybe somebody somewhere bought a little car or settled for a more modest house, and gave the leftover cash to charity. But the loudest response came from those who clutched their wallets and cried, "Francis is a Marxist!"

Clean-up operations at the Vatican are well and good, and long overdue. Still, I think it's fair to say that the first Jesuit papacy will be judged by the degree to which Pope Francis can transmute his personal charm into food, shelter, education and dignity for the poor, the sick, the delinquent, the marginalized.

Can he do it? He's a Jesuit. I have no doubt that he will try. To the watching world, I say this. Don't just wish him well. Help.

[source: https--marydoriarussell.net/jesuits-in-space-and-in-the-vatican]

Of Prayers and Predators
An Interview with Mary Doria Russell

by Nick Gevers, who interviewed Mary Doria Russell online for Infinity Plus.

In the last three years, with the publication of her linked novels of human/alien contact and crisis, The Sparrow and Children of God, Mary Doria Russell has become a figure of great popularity and significance in the SF field. The Sparrow won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and is scheduled to be filmed; Children of God is a strong contender for this year's Hugo Award for best novel. As soon as I had read The Sparrow, I became convinced that Mary Russell, with her wit and humanity, her fine command of language, and her mastery of cultural and characterological portraiture, was American SF's biggest find of the 1990s; Children of God confirmed this impression. So I was very grateful when, in June 1999, Mary, despite current ill-health, agreed to do an on-line interview with me for infinity plus. As context for the interview, I begin with a revised version of my 1998 Parsec reviews of The Sparrow and Children of God; my questions, and Mary's genial, sharp, and thorough answers to them, follow.
CONTEXT

The Sparrow (1996), published by mainstream imprints in both America (Villard) and Britain (Black Swan), very quickly achieved critical and popular success inside and beyond SF's established constituency. The Sparrow's importance for the SF of the 1990s stems from this wide impact: it takes SF out of what seems a diminishing ghetto, relegitimizing the genre among a larger readership; at the same time, it refreshes SF from without, with a humour, a sympathy, and a pathos that are bracing. The Sparrow has been labelled one of the books of the decade; on reading it, it is not hard to see why.

Russell, who has an academic background in palaeoanthropology, has revived the anthropological SF that was so central to the genre in the 1970s. Her object of study is partly us, and partly two species of aliens, whose resemblance to us is both profoundly misleading and disturbingly enlightening. This duality of focus is seen in the novel's narrative structure: chapters alternate between a Jesuit mission to a far world, in which the reader is invited to gaze outward to the alien, and the sad aftermath of the mission, in which vision must turn painfully inwards. The outward chapters are extrovertedly blithe and jaunty, as a gangling young radio astronomer detects musical signals from Alpha Centauri, tells his friends, becomes famous, and is recruited (along with the friends) to join the Jesuit Order's clandestine first human mission to the Centaurian world Rakhat. The true hero is Father Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit linguist of singular personal magnetism who, as it turns out, will have to interpret not only the aliens' languages but also their place in God's scheme. The humans reach Rakhat in great (indeed excessive) good humour; they make contact with surprisingly sympathetic rustic aliens; all proceeds well for a while. But then cultural misunderstandings, human hubris, and sheer bad luck intervene... The inward chapters of The Sparrow occur years later, when Sandoz, apparently the sole survivor, must face his superiors, and the state of his own soul, back on Earth. The VaRakhati have stood as a distorting mirror into which we can gaze; now Sandoz, on our behalf, must look within. Others do their best to help him, and he can move towards redemption, but the joviality of Russell's writing has turned sombre, as the story's full implications, anthropological, moral, psychological, and theological, sink in.

Russell's considerable literary gifts are richly displayed in The Sparrow: witty and affecting characterizations, eloquent, sometimes sensuous prose, a general humorous exuberance, these combine superbly with a sympathetic feminism and an acute understanding of the stark realities of colonialism and intercultural incomprehension to make this novel one of SF's most compelling stories of First Contact. In her descriptions of the alien Runa and Jana'ata, Russell achieves a harshly baroque portrait of alien splendour. All of these virtues continue into a sequel, Children of God (1998), which brings Russell's narrative of existential confusion and hard-earned redemption to its conclusion.

The scope of the tale now broadens; the themes of the earlier book are sounded again, cunningly reversed, and skillfully resolved. Like its predecessor, Children of God consists of two alternating narrative streams. In one, a second Jesuit mission travels to the planet Rakhat, its members hoping that the terrible fate of the first expedition can be explained, that it will be revealed to have had a divine purpose after all; their reluctant companion is ex-Father Sandoz, who emerged from his earlier stay on Rakhat mutilated and raped by the alien Jana'ata, his faith destroyed, and who awaits God's answers with a complex dark cynicism. The interactions of the characters on board ship are volatile and troubled, yet humorous as well, as they interrogate each other's philosophies and motives. In the second body of chapters, we see how Rakhat is meanwhile changing: with a mixture of atmospheric exoticism and keen sociological insight, Russell describes how Hlavin Kitheri, the Jana'ata Paramount, seeks to reform his domain, influenced in an intriguingly oblique manner by his previous predatory acquaintance with Sandoz; how to his frustration a human woman and a Jana'ata renegade spark a revolution by the Runa, the mass of peasants and chattels who are Rakhat's second and more docile intelligent species; and how liberation of the Runa threatens genocide for the Jana'ata. Copious Biblical echoes are struck, as the Runa lose their Edenic innocence, as different equivalents of Moses lead their peoples into the wilderness, as possible redemptive meanings for the horrors of history come in view. Ultimately, the Jesuits arrive; and the resolution of their spiritual, political, environmental, and psychological quests is deeply entwined with the achievement of a new, fragile harmony of Runa and Jana'ata. For the despair that darkened The Sparrow, an antidote of qualified optimism is offered.

Children of God is a further demonstration of SF's potential for cogent discussion of the concerns of politics, religion and history. In Russell's rich tapestry, the ecological balance of herbivores and predators is compared with the relation of serfs and aristocrats, and corresponds also to tensions between the human genders; the mechanics of social change are scrutinized, as inspired reform is vitiated by passionate revolution; human contact with aliens echoes sinisterly yet hopefully the past impact of Europe on the lands it explored and colonized; and in the myths and wars of a distant world, the content of Christianity and Judaism is recontextualized and re-argued. In the 'Rakhat' novels, Russell may at times simplify her issues for the sake of clarity, and moralize a little too sentimentally; but these are minor defects. These dense, deliberate, sympathetic, and eloquent texts are a model for the rest of SF to emulate.

Nick Gevers [source: https--marydoriarussell.net/introduction-to-mdr/interviews-and-profiles/writing-the-sparrow-and-children-of-god]

--- Over (foto 2): Maria Doria Russell ---

Mary Doria Russell (born August 19, 1950) is an American novelist.

Russell was born in Elmhurst, Illinois

She graduated from Glenbard East High School in Lombard, Illinois, which has registered its chapter of the National English Honor Society.

Sparrow series

Russell's first two novels, The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God - sometimes called the Sparrow series or Emilio Sandoz sequence - (Random House Villard in 1996 and 1998) have been called speculative fiction and focused on the religious and psychological implications of first contact with aliens. Both explore the problem of evil (theodicy) and how to reconcile a benevolent, omniscient, all-powerful deity with lives filled with undeserved suffering.

The Sparrow won the Arthur C. Clarke, BSFA, and Tiptree annual science fiction book awards (below), and it was the basis for Russell winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1998.

For The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, chief editor John Clute calls Russell an "author who established a strong reputation for cognitive subtlety and narrative power in her brief [science fiction] career; after the Emilio Sandoz sequence ... she turned her interest to other fields."

Other novels

The rest of Russell's novels have been categorized as historical novels, although she draws from a variety of genres when telling these stories.

A Thread of Grace (Random House, 2005) is a World War II thriller set in Northern Italy and features both the Italian resistance movement and the plight of Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution throughout Europe. Much of story is based on accounts by survivors from the period, when many Italian citizens allowed Jews to seek safe harbor in their farmlands, cities, and ports. (Russell herself is of Italian heritage and is a convert to Judaism.)

Dreamers of the Day (Random House, 2008) is a historical romance set in the Midwestern United States and the Middle East during aftermath of the First World War and the Great Influenza. It focuses on the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, when Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and a group of British oilmen invented the modern Middle East, thus setting the region up for a hundred years of war.

Doc (Random House 2011) is a murder mystery as well as a realistic and compassionate portrait of the notorious "gambler and gunman" known as Doc Holliday. Doc is set in Dodge City, Kansas, during 1878, the last year that Dr. John Henry Holliday's tuberculosis was in check long enough for him to practice dentistry, a profession at which he excelled. The plot revolves around the mysterious death of a half-black, half-Indian boy who leaves a remarkable void in the life of the city. Doc was the American Library Association's Top Pick in Historical Fiction as well as the Kansas State Library's Notable Novel and the Great Lakes Great Reads pick.

Epitaph (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015) picks up where Doc left off, following Holliday and the Earp brothers to Tombstone, Arizona, and traces the political and social roots of the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as well as the making of the mythology that surrounds it. Epitaph is deeply researched; in addition to thorough study of the history of those involved, the 60-year-old Russell rode 58 miles on horseback through the mountains surrounding Tombstone, retracing the Earp Vendetta Ride. The novel was called the best ever written on the subject by Earp biographer Allen Barra and was recognized by True West Magazine as the Best Historical Western of 2015. The Ohioana Library Foundation awarded it the Best Fiction Prize of 2016; it also won the Ohioana Readers Choice Award for the year.

The Women of the Copper Country (Atria Books, 2019) is a painstakingly researched novel about the Copper Country strike of 1913-1914, the first unionized strike against all the copper mines in the Copper Country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The central character, "Big Annie" Clements, is based on "America's Joan of Arc," Anna Clemenc, who founded the Women's Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners and proudly carried the flag in many marches against the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company. Other historical figures, including James MacNaughton, General Manager of Calumet and Hecla, Woodbridge N. Ferris, governor of Michigan during the strike, and Mother Jones, prominent activist and union organizer, are also elaborately and credibly portrayed. The book received a Michigan Notable Book Award for 2020 from the Library of Michigan.

Russell is active on the lecture circuit, speaking at colleges, universities and libraries.

Books

• The Sparrow (Villard, 1996; Ballantine, 1997)
• Children of God (Villard, 1998; Ballantine, 1999)
• A Thread of Grace (Random House, 2005; Ballantine, 2006)
• Dreamers of the Day (Random House, 2008; Ballantine 2009)
• Doc (Random House 2011; Ballantine, 2012)
• Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015 hc, 2016 tradepaper)
• The Women of the Copper Country: A Novel (Atria Books, 2019 hc, 2020 tradepaper)
• *

Awards

• James Tiptree, Jr. Award, 1997, The Sparrow
• British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Best Novel Award, 1998, The Sparrow (UK edition: Transworld Publishers Black Swan, 1997)
• Arthur C. Clarke Award, 1998, The Sparrow
• John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, 1998, citing The Sparrow
• Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame Award, 2001, The Sparrow and Children of God
• Kurd Lasswitz Preis (Germany), best foreign novel, 2001, The Sparrow

[source: wikipedia]

Widely praised for meticulous research, fine prose, and the compelling narrative drive of her stories, Mary Doria Russell is the award-winning author of seven bestselling novels, including the science fiction classics The Sparrow and Children of God; the World War II thriller, A Thread of Grace; and a political romance set in 1921 Cairo called Dreamers of the Day. With her novels Doc and Epitaph, Russell has redefined two towering figures of the American West: the lawman Wyatt Earp and the dental surgeon Doc Holliday. Her latest novel, The Women of the Copper Country, tells the story of the young union organizer Annie Clements, who was once known as America's Joan of Arc. Mary holds a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from the University of Michigan and taught anatomy at the Case Western Reserve University School of Dentistry. She and Don Russell have been happily married for an unusually high percentage of the years since 1970. They live in Cleveland, Ohio.

[source: https--marydoriarussell.net]