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Summary: One of the Best
Review: The Poisonwood Bible is one of the best books to come along in a very long time. Barbara Kingsolver has an incredible gift. Her insight into human life - our strengths and frailties - is uncanny. I was right there with the characters throughout the book. Her knowledge of the history of the Congo was excellent. This is one of the best books I've ever read.
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Summary: This book will appeal to many kinds of people
Review: The Poisonwood Bible works on many levels to educate and entertain. The author successfully writes in four completely different voices -- the voices of Nathan Price's wife and three daughters. This is also a book that evolves through its telling. At the beginning, the acts of father Nathan Price dominate the course of action and the book seems to revolve around his mistakes in evangelizing in the Congo during the late 1950's and early 1960's. Price arrives determined to push his missionary vision on an otherwise content African community. He brings his family along with him, and never allows their feelings or needs to get in the way of his mission. By the end, though, the voices of each daughter have emerged and the father falls into silence. Nathan loses his church and dies alone, separated from his family and apparently lost. The experience changes each daughter's life, though, and the second half of the book focuses on the diverse paths they choose in reaction to a singular event -- the death of the youngest daughter to a snake bite. Steinbeck created small stories within his novels that made for simple parables to understanding his themes - the turtle crossing the road in the Grapes of Wrath, for example. In the same way, Kingsolver tells simple stories with the intent of revealing deeper insights. In one, for example, Price's daughters learn to control the fire in their homemade Congolese oven. The daughters burn a valuable egg when they cook too soon after starting the fire. Their mother, Orleanna Price, spells out the lesson: for a fire (and also independent African republics or children) to grow, you must permit it the chance to burn hot and on its own before trying to harness it as a controllable force.
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Summary: This book changes the way your eyes see
Review: I found this to be one of the most important books I have ever read. It is extremely well written, and more importantly well researched. I was amazed at how many fundamental but emotional topics that kingsolver tackled. Life, Death and the balance and struggle between humans and the earth. Although we all may know that hunger, disease, corruption, greed, ecological distress, and more exist in the world, this book allows you to live it for awhile. I came away realizing that even as a lower middle class young parent struggling from check to check, I am still rich in the eyes of the world. And I can't walk down the street downtown without seeing how much food is thrown out after lunch, or turn on the faucet without thinking about hauling it, or read a story about a premature child saved by medical technology without thinking about the full term children that will starve to death or die of disease. And most of all I can't help questioning our state of excess here in the U.S. and the tragedy it has brought. Perhaps if children's health was not taken for granted our rates of abuse and neglect and even daycare would be lower. Perhaps if we had to grow our own food we would not waste so much and we would not suffer the effects of pesticide residues, and the creatures of the earth would not face those same toxins. For better or for worse this book will make you see the world as a whole. It is truly a brilliant book and a wonderful gift of truth.
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Summary: Not anti-Christian
Review: I am almost finished with this book. It is an very good read--it has held my attention quite well. Some of the reviewers believe it is too PC and anti-Christian. I do not see it this way--it simply questions whether we, as Christians, have a right to shove our beliefs down the throats of unwilling participants and whether we should be endangering our families in the name of Christ. Some things simply can't be solved with Christianity. Many Christians have a bad history of doing this in the name of Christianity--and I consider myself a rather devout Christian! I highly recommend this book for both education and entertainment. I loved the characters in this book--even Nathan. I see a screenplay in the works!
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Summary: Poisonwood Bible rated by a Southerner
Review: This is a truly excellent book. I would recommend it to anyone who has tender feelings about life and the desires for happiness. As I read the book I could not believe that every thing I was reading was not exactly true. It is very easy to believe and is very touching; I will never forget. Isn't that often the real test? How long do you remember the book? I'll remember the Poisonwood Bible a very long time.
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Summary: An excellent historical fiction
Review: Kingsolver's writing is beautiful, and her character development is extraordinary. The narration from several different characters gives the book a great flow, and the story is mesmerizing.
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Summary: I've read the posted bad reviews, and I disagree because...
Review: I have read the posted bad reviews (or as many as there were through the 220th review) and they did not convince me that this is a book not worth reading. This is a book to be cherished and discussed because it is a work of literature. I had the pleasure of hearing Barbara Kingsolver on her book tour promoting "Prodigal Summer". Most of the questions from the audience were about Poisonwood, and Kingsolver expained her writing style. She starts with a theme, then comes up with a question that the story must address. After that she decides what voices are needed to explore and resolve the theme and the question. This book started out with four narrators, but she realized that four points of view were not enough, so one character split into two, the twins Adah and Leah. The theme of this book is redemption, and the question posed is how can we redeem ourselves after we have made mistakes. All kinds of mistakes are made in this book by all of the main characters, and they are all seeking redemption, whether they know it or not. Some do not find it, some stop looking, others do find it. It is an epic journey spanning 30 years, and a story to be savored by her readers. There are a couple of posted reviews saying she needed to research this book more. She researched this book for 20 years! She had file cabinets full of information that she collected over the years; so much so that she referred to this book as 'The Damn Africa Book'. She told a story of standing for hours in a zoo waiting for a green mamba snake to open its mouth so she could put it in this book. She wrote every scene in this book from all five narrators' perspectives so that we could distinguish their voices without seeing the name at the beginning of the chapter. It is her magnum opus, and readers who do not understand it are not serious readers of literature; they just don't get it. This is a book to be read, and re-read, and discussed, and studied, by readers of serious fiction. It is not a light-hearted read, and it is not for everyone. But for those of us who get it, we are in awe.
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Summary: Mm.
Review: Lovely literature. Live was I ere I saw evil. Emulp der eno.
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Summary: ONE OF MY TEN FAVORITE READS THIS YEAR
Review: I am working on my third read of The Poisonwood Bible, and still find it to be a wild, intriguing, entertaining and informative ride through the African Congo. During that ride one cannot help but feel intensely BLESSED by the pure abundance we enjoy in our daily lives - abudance that we so often take for granted. (I daily remind myself that access to nutrious food, medical care, transportation, toilet paper, etc. etc. etc. is a BLESSING I cannot have done anything to deserve) Kingsolver offers us this brilliant tale of a doomed, white Southern Baptist family headed by an arrogant, eccentric, and quite sincere evangelist who dedicates his life (and the lives of his family) to bringing the so-called "savages" of the Congo home to Jesus. It is impossible not to see the Price family as a symbol of European Colonialism, and Nathan Price himself as the "burdened white man" who has convinced himself that his White American Christian "superiority" can only be truly deserved through his single-minded and patronizing attempt to help the "savages" assimilate to "the True Path". Never mind that the village Nathan foists himself upon has been surviving for centuries without his religion; that his obsession for dunking the village children in the crocodile-laden Kwilu river makes him nothing but evil in the villager's eyes ; or that his family of young women is assimilating far more of the culture of the village natives, than the natives are of Price's religious convictions. In her telling of the Price family's story, the author's amazing arrangement of words paints an unforgettable work of art and her weaving in of scripture and the juxtaposing of American culture and language with African tradition and language creates a rich feast of the spirit you won't soon forget. Kingsolver's decision to tell this story through the eyes and intellects of the Price children was nothing short of genius. As a vehicle, this allowed for deep and intriguing commentary on such sensitive subjects as politics, religion, culture and race with that remarkable combination of naïveté and clarity that children naturally possess. In the end, however, I thought this story was really the coming-of-age story of Orleanna Price, Nathan's obedient wife. It was after all her initial passivity that allowed the story to ever even take place, and I cannot help but wonder if Kingsolver was telling us something about the world, and the ways of conquering men and the women who do not resist them. What does it ultimately take for us to say "enough?" Enough.
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Summary: Brought me to the Congo
Review: The characters were very well developed. The book came to a peak once the plot unfolded but I felt let down by the ending. It was great to learn about the Congo, and the people, and the culture, and especially the struggles of missionaries in that time. Don't let the word "Bible" in the title turn you away from this book!
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