Rating: 
Summary: Stunning Believable
Review: Few novels moved me so much as this book did. I cried and laughed, laughed and cried for this vivid epic. Set in a far obscure Congo village Kilango about 40 years ago, this story read so vivid and true. I wept for all six protagonists, for their fate and adherence. Especially Adah and Leah. Kingsolver's power of describing the inner conflict of gifted children was incomparable. Every so-called gifted educationist should scrutnize the life story and the way of thinking of Leah and Adah (although this twin were mere fictional!) In my viewpoints the best part of this epic lay on the first two-thirds. With weaving scenes, african aroma, gorgeous language witty, and different viewpoints,those chapters shone with bright sparkle. Almost every section made me gasp. While from their Exodus this splendid sound seemed fade a little. The pace and rhythm was too fast. After all,to tell 25 years of stories of 3 different women in less 100 pages was not a easy task. Often I found myself forgot "how old are Leah(or any other) now",and I must calculate once more. That's because the previous adolescent images of these girls stamped on the reader so deep and firm, they were too vivid to grow up. And sometimes I feel a bit annoying there were too much polictical preachment in these pages. But on the last 50 pages the splendid and gorgeous flame flamed again. The close sections were very beautiful and moving. This is truly a remarkable fiction. Wholeheartedly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Congo through the eyes of five keen-eyed women
Review: I have found that an author who can both tell an amazing personal story and simultaneously educate her readers about historical events is very rare. Here, Kingsolver succeeds tremendously.
In 1959, a Baptist minister named Nathan Price takes his wife and four blonde, blue-eyed daughters into the Belgian Congo to spread the glorious news--that Jesus Christ is bengala! Bengala is the word that can mean both "precious and dear" as well as "poisonwood" in the language of the townfolk of Kilanga, depending on where you place the accents in the word. Of course, when preaching, Nathan gets it wrong and thereby tells his reluctant congregants that Jesus Christ is the poisonwood tree--a tree that burns your skin and thereby brings misery to those who touch it.
This metaphor is apt; the Price family is a disaster in the Congo. The story is alternately narrated by Nathan's wife, Orleanna, and his four daughters. The book touches on many themes--humans as just one form of life in the world; the inherent balance of nature; forgiveness and acceptance; and the evils that well-meaning foreigners can inflict on foreign lands.
The most compelling part of this book to me, though, was the relationship of these five women to each other and to the Congo. Orleanna and each of her daughters illustrates a different perspective as to their almost unimaginable lives in the Congo. Rachel is portrayed as being obsessed with material things, longing for soda, dances, and being popular back in Bethlehem, Georgia. Leah is Adah's twin who seeks for and never acheives her father's approval, so she comes to rely on herself. Adah was harmed by Leah in the womb, so she cannot walk straight and does not like to talk and blames Leah for her disabilities, but she has a unique gift for palindromes and balance. Ruth May, the youngest, is remarkable as the only member of the family to elicit the love of the townspeople. Orleanna is nearly incapacitated with longing, regret, and guilt, and cannot leave the Congo even though she has not set foot in Africa for 25 years.
The first 3/4 of this book is about the family's experience during the 14 months they live with Nathan. However, the book continues to follow the women for the next 30 years, against the backdrop of the original independence movement and the cleptocracy under Mobutu. I found this portion of the book to be somewhat less compelling than the intense story of the women's experiences with Nathan. However, it was still fascinating to see how that 14-month period shaped the women throughout the rest of their lives.
Overall, a beautiful, overwhelming story--so different from the other Kingsolver books I have read. A strong story about women who each triumphs, in different ways, in the face of tragedy. Still more, it is a story about Americans (and all human beings)are only one part in a huge chain of life.
Rating:
Summary: Guilt, atonement, and redemption
Review: 1942. "That was the last I would ever hear from the man I'd married - one who could laugh (even about sleeping in a manger), call me his 'honey lamb,' and trust in the miracle of good fortune." So recent bride Orleanna Price describes her husband's letter home from a military hospital on Corregidor. Shortly afterward, the war dumps onto his shoulders a load of guilt that he spends the rest of his life trying to expiate. 1959. Baptist preacher Nathan Price, determined to bring the Gospel as he believes it to the heathens (as he perceives them) of darkest Africa, arrives in the Belgian Congo with his wife and four daughters. He hasn't been trained to speak the area's language, or to comprehend even the basics of its complex culture. Nor do he and his family know the first thing about how to survive in an environment where the very laws of nature operate differently than back home in Georgia, where Orleanna Price and her girls long to be. With the Congo verging on independence, the Missionary League places the Prices there reluctantly and recalls them a few months later when the area becomes too dangerous. But Nathan Price refuses to leave. Although I'm aware of the author's pantheist beliefs, I honestly do not view this lyrical, hysterically funny, yet at times horrifying novel as a condemnation of Christianity and a hymn to natural law. Its characters are too well drawn and too individual for that. Too real for that, especially after tragedy strikes in a way that finally drives Orleanna from her increasingly irrational husband's side. After their daughters scatter, and the story's second half begins. For me this is a book about the choices we humans make, and how those choices interacting with the world around us - physical, natural, and political - lead to consequences none of us can hope to predict. The guilt/atonement/redemption theme runs through its chapters in a unifying thread. It's also one of the most genuinely feminist novels I've read, in its honest depiction of individual women's lives over a half-century of time and across a variety of cultures. These are not "types" of womanhood. These are fully fleshed people. --Nina M. Osier, author of "Love, Jimmy: A Maine Veteran's Longest Battle"
Rating:
Summary: "Tata Jesus is bangala!"
Review: This is certainly the most powerful book written by Barbara Kingsolver. It is an epic novel, a tale of sin and redemption, set against a dramatic political turnover. The backstage is Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the world economic game that plunges this African country into chaos. On the front stage we have a typical 19th century novel, with a familiar plot (see "The Mosquito Coast," "A Play in the Fields of the Lord," or "Kalimantaan"): the theme of white men trying to force his alien culture and religion on native societies, and the disintegration of previous values held by the intruders. The player in this act is a Baptist family, headed by Nathan Price an arrogant, eccentric, religious zealot, obsessed by faith and guilt, who is destined to risk his own life and the lives of those closest to him in pursuit of "saving souls." He represents the patronizing attitude of white colonialists and their devastating legacy. His wife Orleanna is a symbol of passivity, totally dedicated to the care and survival of her kin. The Price family is complemented by four daughters: the oldest, selfish pragmatist 15-years old Rachel, the shrewd twins Leah and Adah, and the youngest, 5-years old, innocent Ruth May. The story begins with the arrival of the Price family in a small village called Kilanga, in 1959. The four girls narrate the story in turn, at the precipice of events, while the mother narrates in retrospect. The narrative turns on different axes, shaped by the 5 feminine characters, the way they contemplate themselves and one another, the surrounding events and their individual adaptation. Congo permeates "The Poisonwood Bible," with descriptive, colorful, imaginative writing the author transports the reader into a world of tropical beauty, of heat and humidity, of abundance and drought. The author herself lived two years in Congo when she was a young girl and her childhood experiences had a lasting effect on her imagination. Although the author places her emphasis on people and not on politics, this a political angry novel, a critical view of imperialistic arrogance, exploitation, and prejudice. Kingsolver, a radicalist by nature, writes with strong idealistic messages, she deliberately hooks people into a good story and then gives a political lesson. Why the title "The Poisonwood Bible?" Nathan Price, the obsessed missionary shouts "Tata Jesus is bangala!" but it never occurs to him that in Kigongo (the language spoken in Kilanga) meaning depends on intonation, and while "bangala" may mean "precious and dear," it can also mean poisonwood tree, a virulent local plant!.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning, wild, hungry... Kingsolver is a wonder
Review: The author of the magnificent books, 'The Bean Trees', and 'Pigs in Heaven', leaves her protagonists Turtle and her mother in the Southwest and puts us in Africa, the Congo, Kilanga, in 1959. This stunning book is the tale of the family (of girls) of a Baptist preacher who moves them to a Congolese village to convert the heathens. The story is told through the voices of the girls: Rachel, Leah, Ruth May, Adah, Rebecca, and their mother, Orleanna Price. Their father's ignorance and somewhat violent tendencies, the sheer poverty and simpleness of the village, and the vast differences in their lives for these girls from Georgia are expressed by all of them. Their personalities, their strengths, their needs and their confusion are evident by their every word and their complex thoughts. Kingsolver, who is a brilliant writer anyway, brings a fascinating perspective to her imaginary family in the Poisonwood Bible - as she, the daughter of public health care workers who spent time in the Congo when she was very young, "waited thirty years for the wisdom and maturity to write this book." A powerful story, an excellent read.
Rating: 
Summary: The Irony
Review: First of all, PW is a decent story, and Kingsolver does a decent job as she usually does. The problem begins and ends with its overt didactic tone. It takes a chapter or two to despise the father, and the reader is certainly justified in feeling such hate. PW preaches the troubles of placing ideology above self-preservation. Kingsolver does her best to truly impress upon the reader why the father is worthy of derision. She "teaches" this well. She then leaves us with one daughter that is hero-ized for her decision to fight the good fight in Africa. Seemingly, the lesson of derision is supposed to be ignored as the reader glorifies Leah's decision. She, however, has stepped right into her father's footsteps, and she endangers her family in the same vicious way that her father endangered her own childhood experience. This would actually work really well, if Kingsolver maintained or redeveloped in the reader a sense of disgust for the character. Instead, Kingsolver strides into the preacher mode and pushes a socialist agenda in as strong a fashion as Updike does in _The Jungle_.
Rating:
Summary: A Journey Into The Unknown...
Review: This book showed me things I didn't know, but had been very curious about.
A father,who is a Baptist minister, takes his family
which consists of himself, a wife, and four daughters to the Congo in Africa to spread religion. This book relates the family's adventure.
At times I felt I was right along with them, experiencing the dark continent. This was a extremely good book:)
Rating:
Summary: Phenomenal Achievement
Review: Having read Pigs in Heaven and The Bean Trees, I expected more of the same from Poisonwood. I couldn't have been more wrong -- or happier. TPB is one of the best books I've read in the last several years. The book deals with the effects of the Congo and the political turmoil of the early 60's on a family of very unprepared missionaries. It doesn't stoop to easy moralizing or condemnation, but instead focuses on the people involved and how they change. Each of the daughters has a distinct personality that reacts to and affects that of their parents. The villagers they attempt to convert are three-dimensional, neither the ignorant savages the father expects nor the romanticized pacifists that some stories feature. I was skeptical that a writer whose previous books (at least the ones I'd read) had focused on women in Arizona and Appalachia could believably recreate the tumultuous Zaire of the 1960's. I was completely wrong. Having read King Leopold's Ghost before it and Genocide in the Congo after, it definitely rings true in its portrayal of central Africa trying to emerge from a brutal colonial period. When I later watched "Lumumba", it seemed as if the world she had described came alive... Read it, laugh, learn and cry! It will all be over far too soon...
Rating:
Summary: Poisonwoood Bible
Review: This book was presented to me as a school assignment. I looked at it and said o great we got the biggest longest book on the list, and its about a pastor's family blah .. but was i wrong .. this is one of the greatest novels i have really read . it has captivated my attention throughout the whole book and the "orleanna price" chapters keep me going and striving for the next one due to their immennse intensity and interesting ideas that are put forth. i would highly recommend this book to anyone of any age . and do not judge it on its size!
Rating:
Summary: This is A Great Book that Must be Read and re-Read
Review: Each time I pick up this book to read,I find more mystery
and symbolism.There is the story of Orleanna,and Nathan,her
husband.This plays a big part.Then there are the four
sisters,different as sisters always are in any family. I believe the author used the sisters'different stories
to show us their growing pains along with the great
struggle of Africa,itself. I remember the events of
1960,when I was a young girl in school.Daily they were
published as these nations,who were formerly under
European colonialism asserted them-selves into the
modern world. After my third reading and reflecting,
I wanted to ask the author,if she was showing us
Africa through the missionaries' daughters.
Take self absorbed Rachel,with her white blonde hair,
yearning for Breck special formulated shampoo,while
Congolese chidren are starving within feet of her. It
was only natural she would find a haven in South Africa
during apartheid.She left her Family,but she never left
Africa. Leah,the dominant twin,who admires her missionary Father,
(the most narrow dominerring man around)she embraces
Africa,wholeheartedly,to the point of marrying a sweet
Congolese teacher and bearing his sons.She names her
little sons the names of rebel men.She exults in
her hunger and poverty,(but I found her tone judgmental.)
She too is tied to Africa,forever. Adah,the next twin,told she was deformed at birth,is
quite a genius.She watches and absorbs Africa.Usually
ignored,she invents her own language,when not reciting
Emily Dickensian's poems.She returns with her Mother
to Georgia,where a neurosurgeon cures her of her
handicapped way of walking.She is proud of her normalacy
In private,she locks the door and returns to her crippled walk.
Is she cured emotionally ?She is a Dr. specializing
Tropical studies for Africa.She too carries Africa in her blood.
First,going forward in her physical progress,then retreating
to the old ways,so like the Congo she left. Next,lovable little Ruth May.She too never leaves Africa.
For a different reason. There is so much to think about.Those were my thoughts
without revealing this fascinating story.I believe the author was expressing more, and this is an undertone in the Novel.
It is like the old saying.A Novel is like an iceberg,you
read the 10% that is showing,and beneath lies 90% of the
unseen story.
|
