Bookend
Bookbuyer
One of Heinemann's best-selling authors, who gets reprinted every -year, is Kahlil Gibran, a kind of Lebanese Patience .Strong. His best-selling book The Prophet, full of mealy-mouthed exhortations about love and justice couched in a biblical patois, seems to have met with a warm reception everywhere except in Gibran's home town where it has caused at least two deaths. The author bequeathed the royalties from seven of his books to the small village of Bsharri in the Lebanon without thinking that they would bring in more than a few thousand dollars a year. But by the early 'fifties they had risen to a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year, causing bitter feuds in the families administering the estate and expensive legal battles between rival claimants that cost much of the money being fought over, Like Gibran's aphorisms, though, the story has a happy ending. Four years ago the Lebanese Government took over the management of the estate, and love, justice and harmony resumed in the, author's birthplace.
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