As Harrison Salisbury wrote in the Chicago Tribune, "James Michener is as much an American institution as the Fourth of July or apple pie." Michener wrote short stories, essays, poems, and art histories, but he was best known as the author of lengthy nov...

James Michener has published nearly a dozen volumes of fiction, but such is his versatility that he has published more than an equal number of volumes of nonfiction, and more than one hundred articles in periodicals. He does, however, think of himself pr...

James Michener (1907-1997) is best known for his many epic historical novels, which have sold an estimated 75 million copies worldwide. He was also a noted philanthropist, having contributed more than $100 million to universities, libraries, museums, and...

I heartily endorse the Montgomery County Council's recently approved legislation invalidating certain real estate convenants {"Homeowner Backed in Shingle Dispute," Dec. 3}. Even though I am not an advocate of increased government regulations, I also favor additional legislation to reduce the scope and power...

THE PAST 40 YEARS have been times of liberation from oppressive orders, whether colonial, totalitarian, racist or sexist. The next 40 years must be times of founding and refounding orders of covenantal relationship. In terms of religious symbols, it is time to move...

They're America's other Baptists _ the ones who appoint women pastors, work with theological liberals and line up more closely with President Carter than with President George W. Bush.Over the last 25 years, they have watched with growing concern as their conservative Southern Baptist brethren...

A Lutheran congregation is grappling with how to deal with a convicted sex offender who says his church attendance is an important step toward rehabilitation.Clergy and members at Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd say they're in a quandary over how to protect their children...

Michener has been known to rush through millennia before this, and in The Covenant, set against the backdrop of history from the formation of the earth's crust to the present day, he polishes off a dozen generations of good men and true…. [The] narrative proper commences somewhere between the 15th and 17th centuries, involving three families [Black, Dutch, and English] …, whose intertwined lives embrace the whole of South African history, even if it means manipulating episodes to suit t...

James Michener has found, perhaps even perfected, a formula for commercially successful novels: He begins with exhaustive research on the social, cultural and political history of a particular nation or region; then he dramatizes the results of his research through fictional characters who recapitulate in their lives the experience of the nation or region over time, often a span of centuries. The enormous sales of his novels testify to the popularity of his approach with the reading public. The Covenant, a ...

[As] Mr. Michener showed in his previous blockbusters, scope is his forte, and legions of readers will find that techniques applied successfully to other cultures have not failed [in "The Covenant"]. (p. 3) As in some of his past works, Mr. Michener's characterizations are sometimes flat, his sentiments naïve, his dialogue unreal. Prehistoric Bushmen, their poisoned arrows proof of an ingenuity "that could in time contrive ways to build a skyscraper or an airplane,"...