Good condition but not perfect, Cover has minor nicks and tears, spine shows some creases from use. Ask Questions and request photos if your buying for the cover and not the content. STOCK PHOTOS MAY VARY FROM THE ACTUAL ITEM. ACTUAL PHOTOS AVAIL. UPON REQUEST. Additional Details ------------------------------ Product description: Los Angeles "This is the stuff of which great novels are made . . . A powerful and significant book."This New York Times bestseller is a "superbly written adventure fiction, but much more, adventure extended beyond reality into the mind and soul of a man.Donald Webb is an American consul stationed in the main port city of a Central American country. He has resigned himself, not unhappily, to a life of compromise and safety, until the day he receives a report from deep in the mountain jungle, a peculiarly incomplete report of the death of an obscure American painter whom he remembers from a brief and strange encounter. The report and the memory combine to draw Webb into the jungle to find out the truth, leading him eventually to the base of a steep and forbidding mountain. There, in a mining camp, he learns that he must go yet further, and starts to climb to the peak. It is during this climb that Webb finds his life on a new, dangerous point of balance?an experience that leads him deep into himself far beyond the safeguards of civilization."Reverend James Keller, McNaught "This provocative story dwells in a most engaging manner on the 'mystery of our role on earth?the great questions at the beginning and end of our existence.' . . . The quest leads the consul into deep soul-searching of his own. Readers find themselves confronted by the same eternal challenge ?which can be pushed from our minds, but cannot be denied."Modern "[Vale] achieves a supreme tour de force, a prolonged painting in words which evokes the same kind of response as a masterwork done in oils . . . Those who do not read The Thirteenth Apostle are depriving themselves of unique and enormous pleasure and profit."New York "Mr. Vale is the only contemporary novelist of recent years, to my knowledge, who has made so ambitious an attempt to encompass in a single fabric every clue to modern man's devious retreat from engagement."Saturday "'The Thirteenth Apostle,' by Eugene Vale, is a philosophical novel which seeks answers to mans questions about his place in the universe. . . . Where did we come from? Where do we go? And in between why are we here? What must we do? What is the meaning and the purpose? Is there a God, and, if there is, how can He permit the wicked to flourish and the good and innocent to suffer? . . . We should have to go back to Thomas Mann?s 'The Magic Mountain,' I believe, to find a novel as rich in philosophic content as 'The Thirteenth Apostle.'"