John Bunyan’s life was an exciting one. That’s what he had wanted as a young man. He had left the security of his father’s workshop to join the Parliamentary troops fighting against King Charles. There was no way he was going to settle for a boring life… but over time the thirst for excitement was replaced with a longing for something more. A friend takes him aside in the heat of battle and asks him if he has a faith – a real faith – a personal one. And for the first time John Bunyan hears about the only way to get to heaven, which is through the Lord Jesus Christ and his sacrifice on the cross. John knows he isn’t good enough to get to heaven. But when he realizes that Jesus Christ is the only one who is good enough, the real excitement begins. Bunyan the Pilgrim’s journey takes him through the Civil War and into other conflicts. A prison cell awaits him but so do opportunities to share the good news of Jesus Christ. John Bunyan, the tinker soldier, became one of the world’s favourite Christian writers – with his books being read by men as diverse as Charles Spurgeon and Vincent van Gogh.
Hole in My Life
Becoming a writer the hard way
In the summer of 1971, Jack Gantos was an aspiring writer looking for adventure, cash for college tuition, and a way out of a dead-end job. For ten thousand dollars, he recklessly agreed to help sail a sixty-foot yacht loaded with a ton of hashish from the Virgin Islands to New York City, where he and his partners sold the drug until federal agents caught up with them. For his part in the conspiracy, Gantos was sentenced to serve up to six years in prison.
In Hole in My Life, this prizewinning author of over thirty books for young people confronts the period of struggle and confinement that marked the end of his own youth. On the surface, the narrative tumbles from one crazed moment to the next as Gantos pieces together the story of his restless final year of high school, his short-lived career as a criminal, and his time in prison. But running just beneath the action is the story of how Gantos – once he was locked up in a small, yellow-walled cell – moved from wanting to be a writer to writing, and how dedicating himself more fully to the thing he most wanted to do helped him endure and ultimately overcome the worst experience of his life.