New Book

I have started a new book this week and so far I am really impressed and intrigued by the story. I enjoy reading theology and therapy books or what Jessica calls "self-help" books, but I am trying new things everyday. If you are not trying new things then you probably are not growing as an individual.

Same Kind of Different As Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. Below is a review from their website.

An international art dealer and a modern-day slave from Louisiana become friends after the art dealer is roped into volunteering at a homeless shelter by his saintly wife. Sounds like it's got to be fiction, but that's the true story told in Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore (W Publishing, June). Co-author Hall, the art dealer of the pair, spoke to RBL from Miami, where he had just arrived after a week's vacation on his boat, saying, "Now that I have lived it for so long, it doesn't seem quite so out of the ordinary."

By contrast, Moore spent almost the first 30 years of his life on Louisiana cotton plantations, where he and his family grew and picked cotton and were never paid cash for their work, but given credit. The vicissitudes of his life, including a stint in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison, eventually brought him to a homeless shelter in Fort Worth, where Hall's wife Deborah, a volunteer, prompted by faith, love and persistence to become increasingly involved in the shelter, singles out Moore. She maneuvers the suspicious Moore and her Suburban-driving, Starbucks-drinking husband into a friendship that grows once "Mr. Tuesday" - the day the Halls volunteer at the shelter - realizes the man he has been calling Dallas is actually named Denver. With hesitations over social differences and revelations of human similarities, the story of intertwining lives knots decisively when Deborah develops colon cancer and dies.

Moore suggested the two write a book, which began as a therapeutic exercise for Hall. "I really wrote the book to honor my wife and honor Denver, who both deserved a place in history," Hall explained. Moore told his half, and Hall wrote it and his half, rewriting the manuscript 14 times before he got up the nerve to take it to agent Lee Hough at Alive Communications. Co-writer Lynn Vincent was brought in to help craft the story and also to vet the events of the true story. The controversy over author James Frey's embellished memoir cast a long shadow over the book during its preparation. "It made us be much more rigorous than we otherwise would have been," said Greg Daniel, v-p and associate publisher at W. "It looks like we're as clean as we can possibly be."

The once homeless man now lives with his art dealer buddy, who owns residences in Dallas and New York and a ranch near Fort Worth. Moore has recovered from an aneurysm and stroke and is pursuing a new career as a painter. "He's doing some interesting self-portraits," the art dealer says. The authors' profits from the book will go to the Union Gospel Mission in Fort Worth, which now includes the Deborah L. Hall Memorial Chapel.

- Marcia Z. Nelson, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 5/31/2006