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Bright Starts Little Outdoor Adventure Book

Bright Starts Little Outdoor Adventures Book
Let’s go to the park! Baby will have fun learning letters, numbers, and nursery rhymes all while exploring outdoor adventures in this electronic book! Songs and sounds add a new element of play to story time. Adorable characters explore different outdoor adventures in the park and on the playground with nursery rhymes and fun phrases that play along with the story. Pages are fun and easy for baby to flip through Teaches ABCs, 123s, and nursery rhymes.
Product Measures: 6.85"L x 1.73"d x 6.3"h
Recommended Ages: 6 months & up

"A Brighter Day"

Tuesday, June 5, 2007 was cloudy with scattered showers in Sharon, Vermont when our film crew arrived from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

I was irritated that the weather was slowing us down again. We were all huddled under a 12x12 pop-up awning when sunlight hit the back of my neck and I knew something wonderful was about to happen. I grabbed a still camera and went running across the lawn, one of my assistants dutifully chasing me with an umbrella.

This photograph was not enhanced in any way. The aura on the monument is from the sun's reflection, diffused by the rain. The sun and the rainbow are just as they appeared for a few brief moments on that beautiful summer evening.

The Joseph Smith Birthplace is one of my favorite places in the world, and my favorite LDS Church History site. I was born, raised, and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New England. My mother was born and raised in Windsor County, Vermont, just down the road from Sharon, so this area has added meaning for me.

But the most important thing for me about this picture is that I know that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God. Every time I look at this image, I remember one of the great things of God: His Prophet of the Restoration. I also believe that the Lord put us there that day for a reason.

It seems to me that the Heavens are remembering the Prophet Joseph that day as well. The clouds broke, and gave us a brighter day.

So it was with the dark clouds of apostasy, which began to break on 23 December, 1805 as a baby was born on this site who would usher in the Brighter Day of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ.


John P. Starrs
starrman.com

MINIATURE OF MADONNA AND CHILD

The Virgin Mary standing holding, and looking lovingly at, the baby Jesus in front of a golden oval sun which is bursting forth with golden rays in a dark blue sky and giving darker blue clouds a “golden lining”.

The Virgin wears a pale blue/grey dress and bright blue cape and Jesus a pink robe. The use of several colours to create the delicate features and the use of gold cross-hatching on the clothing and the hair results in a miniature of great charm and quality.

A border in gold and very deep red surrounds the miniature. It measures 41mm x 37mm (1 5/8ins. X 1 4/10ins.). In the top right hand corner is the illuminated initial (liquid gold on deep red) that begins the “Obsecro te”.

According to the Golden Legend, the vision known as the Ara Coeli occurred when the Emperor Augustus had reached the pinnacle of his power and was planning to establish himself as a god. Before initiating his own cult, Augustus consulted the Tiburian Sibyl who announced to him the birth of a child, the Christ, who would surpass him in power. Augustus promptly renounced his pretensions and worshipped the Virgin and Child who appeared to him against the background of the sun.

“Bright’s Passage shines with a compressed lyricism that recalls Ray Bradbury in his prime…This is the work of a gifted novelist…” – Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review
Josh Ritter’s first novel is a wondrous, suspenseful, and uniquely affecting story of the journey taken by a father and his infant son.

Henry Bright is newly returned to West Virginia from the battlefields of the First World War. Grief struck by the death of his young wife and unsure of how to care for the infant son she left behind, Bright is soon confronted by the destruction of the only home he’s ever known. His only hope for safety is the angel who has followed him to Appalachia from the trenches of France and who now promises to protect him and his son.

Together, Bright and his newborn, along with a cantankerous goat and the angel guiding them, make their way through a landscape ravaged by forest fire toward an uncertain salvation, haunted by the abiding nightmare of his experiences in the war and shadowed by his dead wife’s father, the Colonel, and his two brutal sons.

At times harrowing, at times funny, and always possessed by the sheer gorgeousness and unique imagination that have made Josh Ritter’s songs beloved to so many, this is the debut of a virtuoso fiction writer.

A Letter from Author Josh Ritter

© Marcelo Biglia
The central premise of Bright’s Passage is that an angel has followed young Henry Bright home from the senseless carnage of the First World War. The book follows Bright during three significant periods in his life, braiding the scenes together finally to portray a young man attempting to meet the greatest challenge of his life: returning home. The angel, perhaps a capricious refugee from the painted ceiling of a shelled French church, perhaps the dream-like manifestation of Henry Bright’s own shell-shocked mind, nevertheless takes up residence in Henry’s horse, and it is through their time with one another and the journey they take together that Bright attempts to find peace, not simply for himself, but if the angel is correct, for the entire world.
War always brims with bloody inscrutability, but the First World War mated the ferocious absurdity of human nature with unprecedented leaps of technological capability to birth a new and monstrous kind of world-striding warfare that for the first time in history seemed capable of wiping away whole civilizations. It was this conflict--the seeming ability of man to spin the world and yet just as easily be spun by it--that drew me to the time period surrounding the First World War, and that gave me my first glimpse of Henry Bright, a man caught up in a whirlwind he is unable to understand or control.
Though continuously pestered by the angel, upon returning home to West Virginia Henry attempts to put the abattoir of his time in France behind him by marrying his childhood friend Rachel and having a baby with her. When Rachel dies in childbirth however, Henry finds himself beset by new and present vagaries even as he attempts to understand the ones he has already come through. A wildfire, Rachel’s vengeful family, and his struggle to protect his newborn son from both now drive Henry Bright, his horse, his goat and his tiny infant into the wilderness in a desperate attempt to finally find peace.
Ultimately, Bright’s Passage is about a man who has come home from war only to suspect that perhaps he has not yet returned from it.