Redemption: The Two Lives of Harry Brooks

Redemption: The Two Lives of Harry Brooks is a work of historical fiction based on the life of Brooks Eason’s grandfather. 

In the first half of Harry’s life, he embezzled money from the Uniontown, PA, school district where he was the elected superintendent, left his wife for another woman, and sought to escape by booking passage on a Cunard liner to Liverpool. But his plan was foiled, Scotland Yard arrested him when the ship docked, and he was extradited, tried, convicted, and served three years in Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh. In the second half of Harry’s life, he came to the South, where he spent his last thirty-five years as a revered and successful Methodist minister and church official. He was a district superintendent overseeing a hundred congregations at the time of his death in 1942. In 1934, when President Roosevelt spoke to a crowd of 75,000 in North Mississippi, Harry was chosen to give the invocation. Nobody in the huge crown knew the preacher at the lectern was an ex-con.