A Handful of Stars
Twenty-two sermon essays, each hung on a single verse of Scripture and the life that verse redirected. Boreham moves without apology between history and invention: William Penn, the missionary James Chalmers, Michael Faraday, Catherine Booth and Francis of Assisi sit alongside Robinson Crusoe, Sydney Carton and Uncle Tom, because, as he puts it, a great romance is a portrait of humanity painted by a master hand. The title lifts a line he quotes at the outset without naming its source, Louis Untermeyer’s poem Caliban in the Coal Mines: “Fling us a handful of stars!” Abingdon Press published it in 1922 as a companion to A Bunch of Everlastings, second of the five volumes Boreham drew from his Texts That Made History sermons. He was a storyteller first, and the pieces still carry a reader who arrives without a creed.
