Rating: 
Summary: Draining. Worth Your Time.
Review: The novel raises important questions about the role of missionaries and the clash of cultures that results when progress, fueled by religious fanaticism, collides with poverty and thousands of years of survival on instinct. The daughters' characters breathe. The visual imagery is stunning. Read this.
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Summary: Only connect....
Review: Reading this book I was reminded of E.M Forsters words in preface to Howard's End "Only connect.." I felt that Barbara Kingsolver has poured her heart and soul into this book and in the process she has connected with the lives of the people it describes. The result for me is the most unputdownable read I have had in many a year. I can understand why some Americans and perhaps more particularly some religious zealots don't like this book but to me it seems to ring so true -the CIA involvement in African politics, the religious fanaticism, the humanity, the fraught lives of people in desperation. Yes I found some minor annoyances in Rachel's malapropisms and Ada's semi-miraculous healing but the story is powerful enough to overcome them and the beauty of the author's writing is quite breath-taking.
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Summary: Seemed superficial?
Review: This book was quite moving and as others have stated, I am continually scrutinizing wasteful habits and inappropriate foreign policy after reading the book. I don't think Kingsolver's purpose in depicting Rachel, Nathan, and Leah was to advocate a certain way of life, but rather to offer the readers a look into how people cope with cultural and economic difference. At the same time though, I do think that Kingsolver is using the characters as foils for the reader's life. How do we compare with the characters? Well, while I'm not a Nathan Price, I'm not always the most culturally sensitive, I am too easily ignorant about damaging foreign policy, and I often minimize the struggle that others are going through in this world so that I can live more like Rachel. It is troubling and I can see why others have not enjoyed the book. At times, it not an enjoyable book at all. Rather, it points the finger to some degree and I appreciate that. Still, I do also wish that Leah or Kingsolver would have introduced liberation theology into the book. The books context was screaming for this, I thought, and it could have shown that there is an alternative to the rampaging of Nathan Price. Lastly, to those of you who thought Rachel was not realistic enough to be believable--I had a step-grandmother (who would be about Rachel`s age) that was exactly as naive, ignorant, uncaring, ethnocentric and just plain dumb as she was. I was able to believe in her character totally!
Rating:
Summary: Going deep in the Congo
Review: Barabra Kingsolver is one of the best novelists writing today. With the Poisonwood Bible, she has surpassed even her own high standards. It is a journey into daily life in the Congo of the mid-twentieth century and onward, a journey that we should all take. I appreciate the depth to which she explores the characters, even with the most challenging of persons and circumstances. I learned through this book about an Africa I never knew, and it changed my life.
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Summary: Been there, done that!
Review: I am so enamored of this book and have only read the first half. I am afraid to lose these characters and dread what must come next. I grew up in a missionary environment in Asia and knew many first and second generation missionaries from Africa as well. I howled through the Price family's preparations to go to the Congo, their wonderfully funny mistakes in habit and custom. In addition to her wonderful prose, Kingsolver delivers the goods like someone who has been through it all. I know...I've been there and done it! My childhood memories thank her and my adult appreciation of literature has been given a gift.
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Summary: Required reading for international development professionals
Review: This book should be required reading for humanitarian/international development professionals. Among many others, "Poisonwood" makes the point that the relevance of a particular worldview is ultimately tied to a very "real" time and place - and that to try to force a worldview on a time and place that it was not meant for can have unimaginable (and disasterous) results.This is also an excellent travel book: One trans-Pacific flight with a layover or two should be enough to finish it off!
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Summary: A multifaceted view of the Congo--both real and imagined
Review: Barbara Kingsolvr has eloquently crafted a marvel here. In the Poisonwood Bible, she relates the story of fiery, self-righteous Baptist minister Nathan Price, who drags his wife and four daughters into the Congo in 1959 for missinoary work. Settling in the village Kilanga, on the Kwilu River, adventure soon unfolds.Told from the point of view of all five female characters, the story is related very differently. Rachel, the teenager, the adolescent twins Adah and Leah, the child Ruth May, and the mother, Orleanna make up this tale.While this delivery in tale is unorthodox and rewarding, the characters all have their flaws. Rachel's self-centeredness and misplaced priorities are frustrating--she genuinely cries over a hole in her favorite dress while children starve outside--as well as her inability to use correct phrasing (a "tapestry of justice"). Ruth May is childly simplistic in her delivery (look for her speech on segregation in the first part of the book), and Orleanna's Earth Mother, wandering style grows tedious in the lengthy middle section.Leah and Adah are the most interesting, and I gravitated to Adah, with her disability and scorn for mankind. She is clearly brilliant, but ignored by all, especially by her smugly self-righteous (to the pointof being insufferable) father.The Poisonwood Bible is at first a slow read, for the first 150 pages, but it soon picks up as the tension rises and falls...characters like Tata Ndu, Brother Fowles, and Anatole onlyh add to the excitement, as does the revelation of what became of each of the wayward sisters as the book ends around 1998.A fiction that dips into politics, the Poisonwood Bible is an enjoyable read.
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Summary: An awesome achievement!
Review: Yes, it starts off slow, but gradually picks up. It's not an airport novel! I only read about ten pages a night, which allowed me to savor and fully appreciate the power of Kingsolver's prose, her creativity, and the depth of her insights. The Poisonwood Bible is of course about an American family that goes on a Christian mission to an isolated village in the Congo on the eve of independence in 1959. I had read the author's book of essays, High Tide in Tucson, last summer, and was very impressed. But I was particularly interested in this book because I have been studying African religions and Christian missionization first-hand and teaching the anthropology of religion for almost thirty years. I found the story to be exceptionally realistic and knowledgeable(although my experience does not extend to the Congo). I can easily think of real life examples of many of the characters in this novel from my own fieldwork, including the fanatical Nathan Price, the kindly Brother Fowles, the gentle but determined revolutionary Anatole, and the vile mercenary Axilroot. I also see too many Rachels in my classrooms, and I wish there were more Adahs and Leahs. I am puzzled and saddened to read some of the negative reviews on these pages, because this book has the power to change profoundly the way Americans see and understand Africa, although in most cases it seems to have succeeded.
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Summary: Now *that's* literature!
Review: Finally, a critically-acclaimed bestseller that actually lives up to its hype. This book makes Tom Wolfe look like Dr. Seuss (although Seuss was actually a clever social satirist, so that comparison isn't really fair to him.) Decades and centuries from now when people of the future look back on the late twentieth century for classic literature, they might not find many American books worthy of being called classics... but now we know that they'll find at least one. It's a comforting thought.
Rating:
Summary: Impressive!
Review: Having been an English teacher for 20 years and spending half my entire life with my nose in a book, I was thoroughly impressed at how well and intricately written this book is.......it was the only time I cried and sobbed aloud while I read......
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