<![CDATA[The Poisonwood Bible]]>

false <![CDATA[The Poisonwood Bible]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1257305175m/7244.jpg 7244 44 Oprah Book Club® Selection, June 2000: As any reader of The Mosquito Coast knows, men who drag their families to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come to any good, while those familiar with At Play in the Fields of the Lord or Kalimantaan understand that the minute a missionary sets foot on the fictional stage, all hell is about to break loose. So when Barbara Kingsolver sends missionary Nathan Price along with his wife and four daughters off to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible, you can be sure that salvation is the one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959 and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher, has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle," says Leah, one of Nathan's daughters. But of course it isn't long before they discover that the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and they've arrived in the middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition to poisonous snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to Nathan's fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity, there are also rebels in the jungle and the threat of war in the air. Could things get any worse? 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 Essays on life, the world, and a snail transported to Tucson. 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. The novel's central character, a fiery evangelical missionary named Nathan Price, is part Roger Chillingworth, the coldhearted, judgmental villain of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, and part Ahab, Melville's monomaniacal captain who risks his life and the lives of those closest to him in pursuit of his obsessive vision. Narrated in alternating chapters by Nathan's wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May, The Poisonwood Bible begins with the arrival of the Price family in the remote Congolese village of Kilanga, a tiny cluster of mud houses devoid of all the ordinary amenities of life back home in "the easy land of ice cream cones and new Keds sneakers and We Like Ike." Moving fluently from one point of view to another, Ms. Kingsolver does a nimble job of delineating the Price girls' responses to Africa and their father's decision to uproot them. 810663 book 1998 The Poisonwood Bible total:94831|5:37966|4:30364|3:16569|2:6132|1:3800| 94831 377057 129009 7557 2 26 false false Sun Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 24 05:30:11 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 24 05:30:11 -0700 2008
However. ...more...]]> 1 24 false false Sat Sep 06 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon May 19 18:43:15 -0700 2008 Tue Jan 27 17:19:31 -0800 2009
* Relativism. I'm sorry, I believe infanticide to be wrong for all cultures, for all times.

* Missionaries, particularly protestant missionaries to Africa were en...more...]]> 5 14 false false Sat Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Fri Jan 11 19:02:15 -0800 2008 Fri Jan 11 19:02:53 -0800 2008
I finished the last 300 pages in 2 days (which is very fast for me - English books). I felt every emotion under the sky with this book. I hated Nathan Price, I hated injustice, I hated my uselessness, I hated the fact that there are n...more...]]> 3 10 false false Thu May 29 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu May 29 16:53:27 -0700 2008 Thu May 29 21:53:00 -0700 2008
I just finished it today. It is the story of a missionary family's trek to the Congo, told thro...more...]]> 5 11 false false Tue Jan 15 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Fri Apr 25 15:58:47 -0700 2008 Fri Apr 25 16:33:12 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 7 false false Thu Nov 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Thu Aug 30 12:38:48 -0700 2007 Wed Nov 14 17:49:24 -0800 2007 more...]]> 4 7 false false Wed Jul 25 06:00:08 -0700 2007 Sun Jul 29 14:59:19 -0700 2007 more...]]> 2 7 false false Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 17 11:21:33 -0700 2008 Fri Aug 29 12:16:26 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 8 false false Thu Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2006 Fri Jan 25 19:13:26 -0800 2008 Fri Jan 25 19:36:50 -0800 2008 more...]]> 4 6 false false Wed Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2005 Sat Oct 13 21:13:42 -0700 2007 Sat Oct 13 21:13:42 -0700 2007
What amazes me about this story, is Barbara Kingsolv...more...]]> 2 7 false false Mon Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Wed Sep 05 18:48:54 -0700 2007 Tue Oct 16 09:47:44 -0700 2007 The Poisonwood Bible is about a Southern Baptist family that decides to go be missionaries in the Congo in 1960, just before the country was supposedly granted its independence from Belgium. The Prices didn't bother with language or culture training, they just took off to spread the word about Jesu...more...]]> 3 7 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sat Dec 29 03:39:23 -0800 2007 Fri Jan 18 18:22:52 -0800 2008
Just a couple of little points though -

1) you have to suspend great balefuls of disbelief. These kids, they're awfully highfalutin with their fancy flora and fauna and fitful philosophising. And ...more...]]> 3 4 false true Fri Jul 25 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Jul 07 11:22:02 -0700 2008 Thu Aug 13 23:00:40 -0700 2009
-Rachel was the Westernized, materialistic primadonna.
-Adah was the depressed, self-described “defor...more...]]> 5 5 true false Mon Feb 14 00:00:00 -0800 2000 Tue May 13 17:33:34 -0700 2008 Tue May 13 17:41:18 -0700 2008 Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, began my interest in Africa and colonialism, and put me on teh path I've followed up to this day with my PhD focus in British colonial history in South Africa. That being said, this is a top-notch ...more...]]> 3 4 false true Tue May 06 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun May 04 15:23:06 -0700 2008 Tue May 06 19:20:03 -0700 2008 more...]]> 1 9 false false Fri Mar 07 06:34:19 -0800 2008 Fri Mar 28 23:23:20 -0700 2008
The main thi...more...]]> 2 5 false false Wed Jul 15 00:00:00 -0700 1998 Sat Mar 01 10:56:14 -0800 2008 Sat Mar 01 20:38:57 -0800 2008
But her characters were false. It was as though Kingsolver ...more...]]> 4 4 false true Thu Nov 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Fri Feb 29 10:21:56 -0800 2008 Fri Feb 29 11:01:02 -0800 2008
This quote particularly stood out to me:

"No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill."
- Adah Price

I have l...more...]]> 5 8 false false Mon Apr 02 16:39:02 -0700 2007 Tue Apr 03 12:53:19 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 5 false false Tue Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2004 Thu Mar 29 13:18:07 -0700 2007 Thu Apr 26 13:12:38 -0700 2007 more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=7244