For Things Left Undone

by Mary A. Agria


Formats

Softcover
$8.95
Softcover
$8.95

Book Details

Language : English
Publication Date : 7/19/2001

Format : Softcover
Dimensions : 5x8
Page Count : 188
ISBN : 9780759633049

About the Book

Thirty years after his stint as a student at the University of Wisconsin in the late sixties, a series of events forces Dubuque stockbroker Brace Abbott to confront his past and the act of civil disobedience that changes his life forever. When his mentor and former professor Jesse Roeder Moran becomes terminally ill, Brace finds himself caught up in a web of conflicting loyalties, among them friendship and the claims to his affections by three generations of Roeder women.

The would-be terrorist Lekowski–Abbott’s college roommate–holds out a moral high-road of confrontation and violence; Jesse Moran, the life of the mind. Her daughter, Aggie, chooses independence from conventional attachments. For Brace, salvation lies in work, or so he believes until an act of what was intended as belated retribution frees him to question the sterile existence he has carved out for himself. It is in facing the reality of death–not in control or ideology--that life becomes truest for these characters who have spent their lives making sense of the Vietnam era experiences that shaped them all.

The novel raises powerful issues of guilt and redemption, of meaning and responsibility, and of the transforming power of relationships and forgiveness: laying to rest the sins of omission–or things left undone–which make life less than intended. "The characters sizzle with life," one reviewer says. "I couldn’t put it down."


About the Author

Author Mary A. Agria spent 11 years in Madison during the turbulent sixties and early seventies, earning a B.A. and M.A. in English and German literature from the University of Wisconsin. Her fascinating career includes work in advertising and publishing, in community development, as a

college chaplain and later associate director of a music school on Long Island, and director of a university career center. Among her numerous nonfiction publications are Rural Congregational Handbook (Abingdon); Planting the Seeds of Community (Augsburg), Winning the Rat Race (Brown-Benchmark), and a syndicated newspaper column by that name running for 15 years in newspapers in Pennsylvania and Iowa. Married to a retired university president and mother of four daughters, she has spent her life in and around the academic world portrayed in the novel. Currently, along with her writing, she is enjoying her lifelong avocation as director of music of a church on Long Island.