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Loading... Poisonwood Bible, Theby Barbara, Kingsolver
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This is on of my favorite books. (  )  5keenoms | Dec 30, 2009 |  Story of the family of an evangenical preacher who move to the Belgian Congo in the 1950s. A bit like The Mosquito Coast in the way it shows how an alien environment can change a family that comes to it from the outside. Epic, poetic and very enjoyable. (  ) neilchristie | Dec 30, 2009 | Another book with lots of hype that I was extremely excited to read. The Poisonwood Bible is about a family of the church who move to Africa to mission and try to build a church. With four girls to take care of, the parents find themselves in dire circumstances over and over again. The mother wants desperately to take her children away, while her husband won’t leave the people to sin and die. While it was a very interesting to see the evolution of the characters and the different female perspectives, I was not as impressed with the story in the end as I had hoped. The diversity of characters, their points of view, growth and separate lives were intriguing and that was probably my most favorite part more than anything else. It was also interesting reading the story through only the eyes of the female characters and not from any males. Overall I was glad I read the story, but it didn’t seem as great as it was made out to be. 1  blondierocket | Dec 22, 2009 | Another of my favorite books of all time is The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I was first introduced to her my junior year of high school when reading her other novel The Bean Trees. I enjoyed the book and wanted to explore more of her work when I discovered The Poisonwood Bible. This novel about the hardships of missionary life in the Congo is not my usual kind of book. I tend to stay away from novels that contain politics or matters of religion, but this book is a different story. Written from the different perspectives of each family member, Kingsolver's novel illuminates the extreme difficulty of living in an unfamiliar land and delivering a message to a people who have no interest in listening. It shows how each character is changed by this profound experience and the power of conflict and politics on people. Issues of religious differences, physical responses to living in the jungle, and political upheaval create much discord in the novel. This is another beautifully written novel that actually somewhat changed my outlook on life. I didn't know much about the world in high school, but this novel began my interest in the world around me, my thoughts on government and politics, and how we should deal with other cultures (whether to interfere in their issues or leave them alone--the anthropologist in me says leave them alone!!). I ended up doing a lot of research on the conflict in the Congo region and writing a paper for the National Peace Essay Contest. Some of my favorite quotes from this book: "This forest eats itself and lives forever." "We can only speak of the things we carried with us, and the things we took away." "When I finish reading a book from front to back, I read it back to front. It is a different book, back to front, and you can learn new things from it. It from things new learn can you and front to back book different is it?" And after all of the harsh realities and devastation in this book, I somehow want to go to Africa more than ever. (  )1 mariacfox | Dec 11, 2009 | Wow. I just finished reading this, and need to mull it over a bit. I'm only scratching the surface here, but it is at the outset the story of a missionary family in the Congo as told through the mother and four daughters. It was fascinating how the girls ultimately turned out. And I was thrilled the mother finally (FINALLY) found the determination to leave her abusive and somewhat insane husband. I wish I could review as richly as this story is told; my words don't do it justice. If you are interested in the recent history of Africa, READ THIS. (  ) nevusmom | Nov 28, 2009 | 
 Kingsolver once wrote that ""The point [of portraying other cultures] is not to emulate other lives, or usurp their wardrobes. The point is to find sense.'' Her effort to make sense of the Congo's tragic struggle for independence is fully realized, richly embroidered, triumphant.  A writer who casts a preacher as a fool and a villain had best not be preachy. Kingsolver manages not to be, in part because she is a gifted magician of words--her sleight-of-phrase easily distracting a reader who might be on the point of rebellion. Her novel is both powerful and quite simple. It is also angrier and more direct than her earlier books. The Congo permeates ''The Poisonwood Bible,'' and yet this is a novel that is just as much about America, a portrait, in absentia, of the nation that sent the Prices to save the souls of a people for whom it felt only contempt, people who already, in the words of a more experienced missionary, ''have a world of God's grace in their lives, along with a dose of hardship that can kill a person entirely.'' Although ''The Poisonwood Bible'' takes place in the former Belgian Congo and begins in 1959 and ends in the 1990's, Barbara Kingsolver's powerful new book is actually an old-fashioned 19th-century novel, a Hawthornian tale of sin and redemption and the ''dark necessity'' of history.
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In fact they can and they do. The first part of The Poisonwood Bible revolves around Nathan's intransigent, bullying personality and his effect on both his family and the village they have come to. As political instability grows in the Congo, so does the local witch doctor's animus toward the Prices, and both seem to converge with tragic consequences about halfway through the novel. From that point on, the family is dispersed and the novel follows each member's fortune across a span of more than 30 years.
The Poisonwood Bible is arguably Barbara Kingsolver's most ambitious work, and it reveals both her great strengths and her weaknesses. As Nathan Price's wife and daughters tell their stories in alternating chapters, Kingsolver does a good job of differentiating the voices. But at times they can grate--teenage Rachel's tendency towards precious malapropisms is particularly annoying (students practice their "French congregations"; Nathan's refusal to take his family home is a "tapestry of justice"). More problematic is Kingsolver's tendency to wear her politics on her sleeve; this is particularly evident in the second half of the novel, in which she uses her characters as mouthpieces to explicate the complicated and tragic history of the Belgian Congo.
Despite these weaknesses, Kingsolver's fully realized, three-dimensional characters make The Poisonwood Bible compelling, especially in the first half, when Nathan Price is still at the center of the action. And in her treatment of Africa and the Africans she is at her best, exhibiting the acute perception, moral engagement, and lyrical prose that have made her previous novels so successful. --Alix Wilber
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:18 -0400)
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