Habits of the Heart is a moral adventure based on a real family's saga. A story within a story, it opens in the chaotic days of 1967 when Jim, a sophomore in college confused by the times, finds a respite from the storm at an Easter family gathering, and so much more. As he listens to his ninety-six-year-old great grandmother share stories from when she was young, he enters a world he never knew, one so captivating that he asks his grandfather to tell him more. Thereupon he discovers more than he could have imagined--an extraordinary story of the life an ordinary man of essential servitude forged on the unyielding anvil of life. Struck by what he hears, Jim realizes how important these stories are in the noise and chaos of 1967--perhaps even more so now--yet how easily they are lost. Habits is a lived picture of the ""habits of the heart"" Alexis de Tocqueville saw when he came to America. Through his grandfather's story Jim discovers how good habits are formed and passed from generation to generation and woven into the fabric of life, and how important they are in life's perilous storms.