Imagine... Eleven generations of a family bearing a surname whose significance and meaning no one ever bothered to question in earnest. Imagine a tribe thirty-two thousand strong, claiming a whole gamut of last names while all hailing from a single glorious ancestor. Imagine adhering to a creed and living by standards handed down from fathers to sons from the days when first names were all that was needed for identification, and not perceiving how they came about and why they matter so much. Imagine living in a land of recent adoption, vaguely remembering storylines from ancient ancestors who claimed to belong to another continent, another era, and were stripped from there by the force of circumstances to an enchanted island, only to become part of its gestation as a novel national entity struggling over two hundred years to find its place in the concert of nations. Imagine . . . Life for Booty is the amazing saga of a peculiar family that received the impetus of a pere-grination back in the sixteenth century from its original Ireland to southeastern France, on to north-western France, on to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola for a four-decade sojourn, only to land on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the Windy City for twenty years of an impossible adaptation. This tantalizing story will inspire, illuminate, and prod to positive action the honest reader who approaches this book with an open mind and a tender heart to the plight of the oppressed peo-ples of an aging and tired planet-yet still groping for hope.
About the Author: Gerald Clerie, a direct heir of this incredible legacy, tells for the first time the fascinating story of this adventure that is far from over, but borrows so much from the millennia-old history of the people of the Bible, to answer the burning inquiries of descendants who are dying to find true meaning-as much as to fill the glaring blanks an evangelical community has longed to remove from its collective memory in its passage from the spiritual darkness of five centuries of enslave-ment to animism and voodoo superstition to the marvelous light of the Gospel of grace. Himself an ordained minister for fifty-seven years, a career educator, a business manager, an entrepreneur in his own right, a local church planter, and a twice-published author in both French and English, he takes you back to times immemorial when the Emerald Isle was being colo-nized by the Celts, through the days of the Thirty Years' War, to the African slave insurrections of the eighteenth century, to the Haitian Independence War to make you relieve a past that should never be forgotten or misinterpreted, for a fresh insight into the tragedy of a nation that should have been a model of democracy for the world, but is slowly dying an ignoble death at the hands of un-worthy leaders.