Author: Everett Wilson

Publisher:

ISBN: 1484987055

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Page: 152

View: 771

"The necessary things are faith, hope, and love. Scoundrels, fools, principalities and powers are unnecessary things which, by default or evil intent, stand in the way of faith, hope, and love."Scoundrels and Fools is Part One of Necessary Things, which is a companion and sequel to Real Things. It features some of the same characters and places, but the focus is no longer on the city of Brighton and the Thompson family, but on Bowl City, NE and its two most famous sons, Christopher Samson and Emmet Jordan, who are heirs of the two earliest, richest and most influential families in Sunrise County. In Real Things Chris is a prominent minister. Necessary Things begins thirty years earlier. when he is fifteen, the only son of the bank president in Bowl City. He is set to spend his sixteenth summer working on a farm as his father and grandfather had before him. This volume is the memoir of Emmet Jordan, a farm boy three years younger than Chris Samson and also an only son. When Chris comes to stay and work with his family,, he asks Emmet if he wants a big brother for the summer. Emmet agrees. At the end of the book, when Emmet is about to deliver copies of it to Chris and a few others who are in it, he is seventy and Chris is seventy-three. They are still brothers. From early childhood on Emmet has an invisible and unusual handicap which leads him to forego marriage and devote his life to the good of others--not an easy choice in a world populated by scoundrels and fools and governed by "principalities and powers, the rulers of darkness of this present age." He thinks his life motto, "I can do this," adopted when he was a child, will carry him through, . From his university days on he is rich, smart, and resourceful, with good parents and loyal friends. But he is not as smart as he thinks. . Before he is thirty-five, he responds to the two biggest crises of his life on the basis of faulty information. Both have lasting consequences. The facts of the second crisis do not come to light until the last chapter, when he and his friends must come to terms with the drastic aftermath of something Emmet did half a lifetime before. That's what makes Scoundrels and Fools Part One instead of the whole story. Still to come is Part Two, Principalities and Powers.