Alice Walker banned
With an introduction by Patricia Holt

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, copyright 1996, 105 p.
Other Contributors:
Holt, Patricia, 1944-

Other titles associated with this book:
Roselily
Am I blue?
Roselily
Am I blue?
Color purple (excerpts)., The


ISBNs Associated with this Title:
1879960478


Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 060816

By the light of my father's smile: a novel

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

The story of an American family--would-be writer Susannah, her sister Magdalena, and her parents--who take up life with an endangered mixed race of Black Indians in the Mexican Sierras, explores how a woman's denied sexuality leads to a loss of self and the sexual healing of the soul


New York: Random House, copyright 1998, 222 p.


Booklist Review: Passionate about her beliefs, Walker risks burdening her art with her polemics. In her first novel since her dramatic look at female circumcision, Possessing the Secret Joy (1992), female sexuality is her focus, but Walker has widened the circle to embrace familial love, eros, and the afterlife. The Robinsons, black anthropologists, were unable to get funding during the 1950s for their study of the Mundo, an isolated black and Indian tribe living in Mexico. The patriarch gamely poses as a minister, and the couple bring their young daughters, Susannah and Magdalena, to the wilds of the Sierra Madre. Predictably enough, their immersion in Mundo culture has profound and unforeseen consequences, all connected to sex. Even though the adults enjoy an ardent sexual relationship, one that Walker describes in exacting, not to say instructive, detail, the father is outraged by his younger daughter's ecstatic involvement with a Mundo boy, and his violent response leaves an indelible mark on them all. As Walker explains why in vivid flashbacks, she shifts point of view between men and women, and the living and the dead. As the novel begins, for instance, Susannah's recently deceased father watches her and her Greek husband make love, then later, in another boldly explicit scene, he observes her great pleasure in bed with her lesbian lover. Whether the scene is Mexico, the States, or Greece (the locale for the novel's most arresting passages), or whether the liaisons depicted are lasting or fleeting, the message Walker conveys is that sex brings us closer to God, that, as the Mundo believe, "spirituality resides in the groin, in the sexual organs." This is a seductive but flimsy foundation on which to base a novel, and Walker has created a romantic but propagandistic fairy tale that veers disconcertingly from the facile to the heartfelt. ((Reviewed June 1 & 15, 1998)) -- Donna Seaman

Publishers Weekly Review: A passionate but somewhat misguided polemic against the abuses of patriarchy, Walker's first novel since Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) tells the story of two daughters who overcome the sexual repression forced on them by their anthropologist father. In the early 1940s, the Robinson family travels to rural Mexico, where Mr. Robinson (who, unnamed, narrates most of the novel from beyond the grave) and his wife, Langley, are studying a doomed people known as the Mundo, the wise, egalitarian descendants of escaped slaves and Indians. The central event of the book comes when Mr. Robinson, ordinarily a gentle man, finds his 15-year-old daughter Magdalena having sex with a local boy, Manuelito, and beats her, in a scene witnessed by Magdalena's younger sister, Susannah. To the relief of Mr. Robinson's repentant ghost, both daughters find ways of fulfilling themselves despite this trauma: after an encounter with a fortune-telling dwarf (the village outcast in the native home of Susannah's Greek husband), Susannah leaves her husband and enters into a loving lesbian relationship; Magdalena, now a hugely obese academic, bumps into Manuelito (now an alcoholic, crippled, impotent Vietnam vet) on an airplane and, against all odds--in the book's one disappointingly reticent love scene--reconsummates their love. The deeper reconciliation between father and daughters takes place in the spirit realm. Even Walker's fans are likely to find the novel hard going, as the narrative moves confusingly back and forth between living and dead characters, the past and the present. Between the highly schematic plot and the characters' habit of speaking in self-righteous pieties and (fictitious) indigenous proverbs, Walker can test one's patience. Yet her spare, charged language, and her earnestness (whatever one may think of her extravagant historical claims or her essentialism in matters of race) will no doubt continue to win her a wide readership. Author tour. Editor, Kate Medina; agent, Wendy Weil. (Sept.)

Library Journal Review: Reading more like an essay than a novel, this latest work by the prodigious Walker (Anything We Love Can Be Saved, LJ 5/1/97) is an "exploration of sexuality and how society's attitudes toward it have damaged both men and women." (LJ 8/98)

Kirkus Reviews Another idiosyncratic novel from Walker (Possessing the Secret of Joy, 1992, etc.), moving and puzzling by turns. Ostensibly about the search of Susannah, a successful novelist, to come to terms with her past, the book often reads more like a series of mournful lectures about the ravages inflicted on the planet, and on women, by the white patriarchy. Susannah has been fortunate enough to spend much of her childhood among the Mundo, a deeply spiritual tribe in the Sierra Madres, descendants of Mexican Indians and escaped slaves. Susannah and her sister Magdalena are taken to live with the Mundo by their parents, enthusiastic amateur anthropologists, partly to allow the family, who are African-Americans, to escape some of the violence visited on blacks in 1950s America. Susannah takes a nurturing sense of spirituality from her stay with the Mundo. Her sister, Magdalena, however, is badly scarred by the manner of their leaving: Discovering that the adolescent Magdalena has taken a Mundo boy as a lover, her father beats her and sweeps his family back to the States. The novel, narrated in the voices of a number of characters (living and dead), follows Susannah and Magdalena's varying paths: the writer Susannah takes lovers and restlessly searches for enlightenment; the self-destructive Magdalena becomes an academic and is only redeemed when she reunites briefly with her Mundo lover, though too late to stop her slide toward suicide. Susannah's peace is helped not only by her knowledge of the Mundo but by several ghosts and a wise, elderly Greek woman, a devotee of the old fecund religion of the Goddess. Walker is still a wonderful storyteller, offering a prose of great lucidity, but many of the characters here seem unbelievably serene and rather one-dimensional, with the discursive tale offering too little action, and too many lectures. An uncomfortable mix of visionary fable and screed.
(Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1998)



Features about this author or title:

1. Author Read-Alike - Alice Walker


Author Web Sites:
1. About Alice Walker : Features Walker's biography and a selected bibliography.


Other titles associated with this book:
Light of my father's smile., The
My father's smile
Father's smile


ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0375501525
0345426061 : Paperback
0375404740 : Cassette - Audio
0613212762 : Glued Binding
0606179852 : DEMCO Turtleback


Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• Booklist, published by the American Library Association
• Publishers Weekly, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Library Journal, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 060817

Color purple, The: a novel

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

Two African American sisters, one a missionary in Africa and the other a child-wife living in the South, support each other through their correspondence, beginning in the 1920s.


New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, 245 p.


Booklist Review: The lives of two black women are put into a jolting and revealing perspective in Walker's latest novel. Sisters Nettie and Celie are separated from one another as young girls, Celie to become the child bride and wife to a widower, and Nettie to be taken by a black family to Africa as a missionary. Celie's marriage is a harsh and poverty-stricken arrangement, and she is sustained only by a series of trusting letters she addresses to God and to her sister. But eventually even this unhappy marriage proves to be a blessing, as it introduces Celie to a woman with whom she can find love and security. When Nattie returns after a 30-year absence, the sisters' bond is once more made whole in a magical and moving climax, enhanced by Walker's exceptionally eloquent writing. Walker is also the author of You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down.. ((Reviewed April 15, 1982))


Magill Book Review: At the center of this triumphant story is Celie, who gradually overcomes her disadvantages and achieves a sense of self-worth. Ranging from the early 1900's to the 1940's, the novel consists almost entirely of letters, many written in Celie's limited but highly expressive dialect.

The first letters, those of the young Celie, are addressed to God: she does not know where else to turn. Raped repeatedly by her stepfather (she believes him to be her natural father), Celie is delivered of three children by him: the first is taken out and killed; the second and third, a boy and a girl, are given to a local couple. Celie's stepfather forces her to marry Albert, who beats her and badly mistreats her. Strangely, Albert's mistress, a blues singer named Shug Avery, frees Celie from Albert's bondage, first by loving her, then by helping her to start a custom sewing business. From Shug, Celie learns that Albert has been hiding letters written to her from Africa by her sister Nettie, a missionary. These letters, full of educated, firsthand observation of African life, form a moving counterpoint to Celie's life. They reveal that in Africa, just as in America, women are persistently oppressed by men.

Not a feminist tract, this novel nevertheless shows how black women are the victims of black men, themselves locked into destructive cultural myths concerning the nature of masculinity. In Celie's relationship with the stubbornly independent Shug Avery, "sisterhood" becomes more than a cliche. From Shug, Celie gains not only self-respect but also a pantheistic faith in a God that is in everything and everyone. This faith is Alice Walker's as well, and it gives her unflinching portrait of racial and sexual oppression a transcending hopefulness.

Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel--and she scores strongly with it. The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettle--and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettle in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them--because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer--Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery--that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters--thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully--with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility--and battered-ness--of love. A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
(Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 1982)



Features about this author or title:

1. Author Read-Alike - Alice Walker

2. Book Discussion Guide - The Color Purple


Other related features:

1. Annotated Book List - Reading Someone Else's Mail

2. Annotated Book List - The Roots of Modern African American Fiction

3. Author Read-Alike - Alice Walker

4. Author Read-Alike - Nella Larsen

5. Awards (Best Fiction) - Adult -> Best Fiction -> Literary -> National Book Award -> Fiction Category

6. Awards (Best Fiction) - Adult -> Best Fiction -> Literary -> Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

7. Book Discussion Guide - Bastard out of Carolina

8. Book Discussion Guide - Beloved

9. Book Discussion Guide - The Poisonwood Bible


Author Web Sites:
1. About Alice Walker : Features Walker's biography and a selected bibliography.


ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0671727796 : Paperback - Mass Market
0156028352 : Paperback
0151191549 : Hardcover
0671019074 : Paperback
0156031825 : Paperback
0606005870 : DEMCO Turtleback
1568496281 : Hardcover
080851847X : Glued Binding
0156030381 : Paperback
0606308881 : DEMCO Turtleback
0756929733 : Glued Binding
141763281X : Glued Binding
0812446704 : Glued Binding
0151191530 : Hardcover
0812406524 : Glued Binding
0816141428 : Paperback - Large Print
0671922548 : Paperback
039474733X : Paperback
081614141X : Hardcover - Large Print
0521403979 : Hardcover - University Press


Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• American Historical Fiction: An Annotated Guide to Novels for Adults and Young Adults, published by Oryx Press
• MetaMetrics, Inc.
• Booklist, published by the American Library Association
• Magill Book Reviews, published by Salem Press
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Novelist/EBSCO Publishing
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 060818

Finding the green stone
Paintings by Catherine Deeter

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

After saying unkind things to family and friends, Johnny loses both his green stone and his interest in life, and he recovers them only when he discovers love in his heart.


San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, ccopyright 1991, unpaged.

School Library Journal Review: Gr 2-4-- Like everyone in their largely African-American community, Johnny and Katie each have a green stone that glows when they are particularly loving or caring. Johnny loses his and immediately begins acting badly. (It's unclear whether he lost it because he acted badly; at any rate, "because of his hurtful behavior, he deserved to lose it.") His actions make everyone, himself included, sad (no one gets angry in this book). Johnny's father trucks wood (but feels bad about tree-cutting); his mother is a fast-moving community doctor, rushing around with her stone in her mouth (no danger of choking?). When she reacts impatiently to Johnny's loss, her stone turns a sickly color; her amended response is to put her arm around her son and tell him it's his own fault. Only Johnny himself can find it again, but the whole community drops everything to be with him while he looks. When he puzzles over their support, he feels "as if all the warmth inside himself was trying to rush out"--but instead of a fatal chill, he gets his stone back. Allegorical consistency is not the book's strong suit: although the stone seems to be an external conscience, trees and dogs have them too; and the possession of a stone doesn't keep some characters from acting badly. Preachy psychology and muddled fantasy make for a heavy-handed blend. Deeter's warm, bright acrylics are cheery and attractive, but can't save this tract from sinking under its own well-intentioned weight. --Patricia Dooley, University of Washington, Seattle

Publishers Weekly Review: "In a small community on the Earth," every person and animal possesses a shiny green stone. If a stone's owner shows warmth, love and respect to others, his stone glows, but negative actions and feelings cause the stone to become dull and gray until restitution can be made. When Johnny loses his green stone, he must discover the strength and wisdom within himself that will bring the magic glow back to his life. Walker presents a rather forced message in this strange story. The tone is ethereal and removed--odd qualities in such a personal plot--while the writing style, especially the dialogue, is stiff and didactic. Young readers will have difficulty understanding the confusing concept that a person's inner goodness should be reflected in an iridescent rock. Deeter's warm acrylic paintings are full of life, depicting the multiethnic inhabitants of this unusual town, which itself seems enveloped by an eerie green light. The book's intent is noble but in the end simply too hard to swallow. All ages. (Oct.)

Kirkus Reviews The Pulizer Prize-winning novelist tells an allegorical tale with a contemporary setting: Like everyone in their friendly rural neighborhood, Katie and her brother Johnny each possess an iridescent green stone, carried in a pocket or used for games. When Johnny loses his, he accuses Katie of stealing it; later, he tries to steal hers, but to no avail--the stone promptly loses its luster. Though others generously join his search, Johnny eventually realizes that the quest is his alone; and by the time he regains his stone, it's evident that it embodies his unique talents and integrity, and that any stone may lose its power as a result of its owner's failings, from name-calling to more serious transgressions. The focus is on several messages (including that the children's mother is a doctor, and their father is sorry that he's forced to make a living by driving a pulpwood truck), but, still, this holds attention--especially with Deeter's colorful, large-size paintings, glowing with wholesome good health; one especially appealing spread reveals that this is a multiracial but mostly black community. Heavy-handed, but enjoyable.
(Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 1991)



Features about this author or title:

1. Author Read-Alike - Alice Walker


Author Web Sites:
1. About Alice Walker : Features Walker's biography and a selected bibliography.


Other Contributors:
Deeter, Catherine

Other titles associated with this book:
Green stone., The
Find the green stone


ISBNs Associated with this Title:
015227538X
0152015027 : Paperback


Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• School Library Journal, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Publishers Weekly, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 084105

In love and trouble

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

New York: Harcourt, 1973, 138 p.
Kirkus Reviews A collection of stories about black women in love and trouble which amounts to the same thing. They've basically got the light touch of her poems and the same slow fondling description as her novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. And they deal with transitions in much the same way -- by letting things reveal themselves. The stories are just a little thin, though, as Ms. Walker knows because you see her reacting -- one finally erupts in frustration with the heroine trying to behead her husband with a power saw. You also see her working out possibilities. She has several interesting successes -- horrible suspense in "Strong Horse Tea," integrated violence in "Her Sweet Jerome," latent allegory (the phrase is tog heavy, the point rounds on you ironically) in "The Welcome Table." One or two don't make it off the ground but they look like things she just tried for the sake of trying -- like "The Diary of an African Nun," for god's sake. But the real stuff is nice as ever.
(Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1973)



Features about this author or title:

1. Author Read-Alike - Alice Walker


Author Web Sites:
1. About Alice Walker : Features Walker's biography and a selected bibliography.



Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 060819

Meridian

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

A Black woman who grew up amid prejudice and poverty in the South finds comfort and strength in the civil-rights movement


New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, copyright 1976, 228p.

Kirkus Reviews The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) cuts a swathe through southern black life, 19201965, as straight and distinct as a furrow. The stories that comprise In Love and Trouble (1973) pinion and expand the odd personality, the critical moment. But the passage of Meridian Hill through the civil rights movement, in Alice Walker's new novel, is a replay without a firm core. Meridian's great-grandmother was seized with ecstasy at the Sacred Serpent, an Indian burial mound; her father, a visionary too, tried to give the land back to a passing Cherokee; and Meridian, when first met, is a whistle-stop saint facing down a tank so that some black children can discover, without paying, that a touted freak is a fake. After a visit to a once-suspect black church she will break free of abnegation, determine to live and, if necessary, to kill "for our freedom." On either hand are her cohorts in the Movement, black painter and poseur Truman Held, given to speaking French, and northern volunteer Lynne Rabinowitz, Meridian's eager friend who becomes Truman's defeated wife. Like the resolution (to which they are tangential), they seem mandated by history rather than invoked by the story.
(Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 1976)



Features about this author or title:

1. Author Read-Alike - Alice Walker


Author Web Sites:
1. About Alice Walker : Features Walker's biography and a selected bibliography.


ISBNs Associated with this Title:
067172701X : Paperback - Mass Market
0156028344 : Paperback
0671472569 : Hardcover
0151592659 : Hardcover
1557360197 : Hardcover - Large Print


Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 060820

Now is the time to open your heart: a novel
Alice Walker

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

A well-published, numerous-times-divorced woman leaves her lover to embark on a personal journey that begins on the Colorado River and traverses through her past and into her future, while her lover begins his own parallel voyage.


New York: Random House, 2004, 212 p.

Booklist Review: Kate, a successful author fearful of aging and uncertain about continuing her relationship with Yolo, an artist, sets off on a journey of spiritual discovery. She has been profoundly unhappy for some time, dreaming of rivers, until she takes off for rivers--the Colorado and the Amazon. Among strangers, Kate is able to distance herself from her life and her relationship. Yolo, on his own separate journey, meets a former lover, a Hawaiian woman now overweight and weighed down with the recent loss of her son to a drug overdose and a sense that she--like her son--has lost her way. Kate finds growing intimacy among a group of disparate souls who unburden themselves of their pasts under the influence of yage, a South American medicinal herb. Kate finds that the herb allows her to reveal her innermost secrets and puts her in touch with the elders. Despite their frictions, Kate and Yolo have similar reawakenings about the land as mother, overcoming personal and ethnic oppression, and dismantling barriers between the sexes, the races, and young and old. Walker's dreamlike novel incorporates the political and spiritual consciousness and emotional style for which she is known and appreciated.

-- Vanessa Bush (BookList, 10-15-2003, p358)

Publishers Weekly Review: Kate Talkingtree, the 57-year-old writer protagonist of Walker's latest concoction, is a lifelong seeker after enlightenment in the carnal, political and religious realms. After dreaming of a dry river, she decides to take this as a spiritual clue and makes two river-centric spiritual quests. In one, she embarks on an all-female white-water rafting trip down the Colorado River, coming home to her boyfriend, Yolo, a painter, with potentially startling news. She has decided that it is time to give up her sexual life and "enter another: the life of the virgin." Yolo, a feminist-friendly guy, takes this as well as he can. Soon Kate is off on another quest, this time in the Amazon rain forest, where she hopes to heal herself through trances induced by yagé administered by an Amazonian shaman, Armando Juarez. Yagé, a hallucinogenic beverage, is also known as Grandmother to the native peoples. Indeed, it turns out that Kate's Grandmother archetype—representing the Earth, the ancestors and those violated by patriarchy and racism—has been calling out to her. Meanwhile, Yolo, on vacation in Hawaii, encounters a transsexual Polynesian shaman, or Mahu, who charges him with the mission of giving up addictive substances. A subplot involving corporations conspiring to patent yagé creates an unintended irony: isn't the mindset that exploits native wisdom for Western corporate greed similar to the mindset that exploits native rituals for the sake of Western spiritual "healing"? Luckily, followers of the goddess, and presumably Walker's readers, are not very keen on irony. Those who retain some affection for that hopelessly outdated and patriarchal trope are advised to bypass this inflated paean to the self. 100,000 first printing; 8-city author tour. (Apr.)
— Staff (Reviewed November 17, 2003) (Publishers Weekly, vol 250, issue 46, p36)

Library Journal Review: Kate, a wealthy author and self-proclaimed seeker, is dissatisfied with the state of the world, her life, and her relationship with her latest lover, Yolo. A journey both physical and spiritual takes her down the Colorado River on a raft and eventually to a shaman's retreat in the Amazon. Along the way, she samples the tragic stories of her fellow seekers and helps them along the path to healing. In the meantime, Yolo pursues his own journey, encountering indigenous Hawaiians and meeting an old lover. Walker has some interesting insights on the power of stories and the nature of the spirit, but they are buried amid improbable situations and characters who have read too many bad books on spirituality. It is difficult to take any of the characters seriously, especially Kate, who comes across as a stereotypical rich, self-indulgent New Ager bemoaning the fate of the world but showing little evidence that she is doing anything to improve it. The author's name makes this a necessary purchase for most libraries, but readers will long for the Walker of earlier days.—Ellen Flexman, Indianapolis–Marion Cty. P.L. (Reviewed November 15, 2003) (Library Journal, vol 128, issue 19, p100)

Kirkus Reviews An aging writer relates the lessons she's learned from life—an unconvincing mix of the politically correct and fabulous—while navigating the Colorado and Amazon rivers.

Kate Talkingtree, the narrator of Walker's latest message-driven story (The Way Forward is With a Broken Heart, 2000, etc.), has much in common with her creator: she's a successful writer, an African-American, and a feminist exercised about all the approved issues of the day, racism, environmentalism, and colonialism. And while Walker still lyrically evokes place and mood, the underlying smug preachiness, the unconvincing experiences, and the idiosyncratic thinking make this more a self-indulgent fantasy than an intellectually provocative tale. Kate's search for meaning begins when, haunted by a dream of a dry river and dissatisfied with her current life, she dismantles her altar honoring deities as varied as Jesus, Che Guevara, and friend Sarah Jane, and joins an all-women's group rafting the Colorado. On this voyage Kate regurgitates all the words from her life, all her memories of past marriages, then returns home to her blue house and male lover, African-American artist Yolo, determined to live as a virgin so she can continue her spiritual explorations. She next joins a mixed group of seekers who all have stories to share (think rape, abuse, addiction) as they seek to encounter the Grandmother and drink her healing medicine while sailing down the Amazon. Kate has to take harsh purgatives until the guide determines that she's ready to encounter the universal Grandmother, a large tree. The Grandmother advises against interplanetary travel, tells her about the life-forms from outer space that fled to earth and live in human DNA, and preaches the oneness of life. None of which fazes Kate, who returns home to Yolo, now back from traveling in Hawaii, where he learned from the natives to honor the old ancestral ways that are uncontaminated by such white pollutants as sugar, tobacco, and coffee. Purged and instructed, they next make resolutions for the future.

An overwrought pastiche of muddled thinking.
(Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2003)



Features about this author or title:

1. Author Read-Alike - Alice Walker


Other related features:

1. Annotated Book List - The Roots of Modern African American Fiction


Author Web Sites:
1. About Alice Walker : Features Walker's biography and a selected bibliography.


ISBNs Associated with this Title:
1400061733
0812971396 : Paperback
0375433147 : Hardcover - Large Print
0739309633 : CD - Audio
0739309625 : Cassette - Audio


Credits:
• Novelist/EBSCO Publishing
• Baker & Taylor
• Booklist, published by the American Library Association
• Publishers Weekly, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Library Journal, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20031120
• TID: 120997

Possessing the secret of joy

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

After submitting to the ritual genital mutilation her people practice, Tashi makes her way in the world, mourning the loss of sexual pleasure. Reprint. LJ. NYT. AB.


New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, copyright 1992, 286p.


Booklist Review: Less manipulator than instructor--but both are the rightful roles of the artist--Walker makes the reader wince at the subject matter of her new novel while at the same time admire the adroit (which means, in this case, nonsensational) way she treats it. She follows her widely discussed novel, "The Color Purple," and its less-talked-about successor, "The Temple of My Familiar", with a certain-to-be-read fictional venture into an unenlightened social practice that unfortunately still exists in some parts of the world. Female circumcision is depicted by Walker as mutilation of not only the body but the psyche; specifically, Walker details the life of Tashi, a woman who grew up in the Olinka tribe in Africa but spent most of her adult life in the U.S. As a child, when the custom of circumcision is ordinarily carried out among Olinka females, Tashi was spared; later, though, her muddled need to reidentify with her origins causes her to submit to the tribal circumciser's blade. Rather than reknitting her soul to that of her people, the episode and its disastrous consequences alienate her body from sexuality and her mind from reality. How she reconciles herself to her plight--and in the process secures vengeance for the many young women who have undergone mutilation before her--is a staggering, but befitting, climax to a novel poised in its avoidance of polemics, confident in the grit of its language, and beautiful in its dual understanding of inhumanity and humanity. ((Reviewed Apr. 15, 1992)) -- Brad Hooper

Publishers Weekly Review: Pulitzer Prize winner Walker illustrates the truism that violence begets violence in this strong-voiced but often stridentan obvious novel? and polemical novel. The focus of Walker's rage is the practice of female circumcision in African cultures. Her tale concerns Tashi, a character who made fleeting appearances in The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar , and who here represents an archetypal figure, not so much a woman as a mouthpiece for feminist distress. Tashi grows up in a small African village but initially escapes the customary clitorodectomy. Eventually she is coerced into having the operation as a means of offering fealty to the sinister politician called Our Leader. When she moves to the U.S. with her husband and assumes a new identity as Evelyn Johnson, her pain and anger, accumulating the suffering of the ages, bubble to the surface in a lingering madness that therapy does not assuage and thatwhy not delete this next phrase (through `finally') as point is made in previous sentence and `accumulate' is repeated, and incorporate the point about "the ages" into the previous sentenc finally culminates in murder. Walker tells the story in very brief chapters, each loaded with the sense of the historical importance she wishes to convey, but the fragile narrative cannot support the weight of her overwrought prose. Walker's protest against ok? author's "message" in the last review "what men . . . do to us" cannot be faulted; its guise as a novel, however, can. (June)

Library Journal Review: A peripheral character in The Color Purple ( LJ 6/1/82) and The Temple of My Familiar ( LJ 3/15/88), Tashi becomes the focus of this welcome new work. Tashi, who marries Celie's son Adam, submits to female circumcision partially out of loyalty to the threatened tribal customs of her people, the Olinka. As a result, she endures physical pain and long-lasting emotional trauma. Not a sympathetically drawn victim, the tortured Tashi stretches to bridge two continents and to understand why women must undergo this torture, even at the hands of their mothers, for the pleasure of men. Though she often succumbs to madness, Tashi eventually takes possession of the secret of joy. Her compelling story is every Eve's account of those ``whose chastity belt was made of leather, or of silk and diamonds, or of fear and not of our own `flesh.' '' This is not a sequel to Walker's previous novels, but it easily equals, if not surpasses, their excellence.--Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia

Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ Here and there tantalizing remnants of the writing that made The Color Purple such a critical success, but for the most part Walker's latest is held hostage to an agenda--the eradication of female circumcision in Africa and the Middle East--a cause to which she will be contributing a portion of the royalties. A range of voices, including husband Adam, son Benny, and the character Tashi herself, tell the story of the Olinka girl who made a brief appearance in The Color Purple. Married to Adam, the young African-American missionary who took her back to the US, Tashi has suffered intermittent periods of madness since she was brutally circumcised as an adolescent in a remote guerrilla camp in Africa. It's a madness that has required hospitalization and treatment by a range of analysts, including the great Jung, who puts in a cameo appearance here. Though her older sister had bled to death from the effects of the operation, Tashi chose to have it done because she felt it would make her "...completely woman. Completely Africa. Completely Olinka." The operation also was responsible for a difficult delivery in which her son Benny was brain-damaged. Helped by therapy, her grief turns to anger: she returns to Africa and murders the old woman who performed the operation. Sentenced to death, Tashi, who feels neither guilt nor fear of death, is finally at peace because an anthropologist tells her about the mythic causes of the practice: the early African woman, "the mother of womankind," was "notoriously free" of both sexual guilt and circumcision; invading tribes and Arabs were responsible for its imposition. Dying, Tashi finally possesses the "secret of joy": the resistance to what is evil. A pastiche of New Age mysticism, dubious history, and feminist ideology tied to a storyline that points a moral, heavily underlined, rather than one that grows out of a tale. Female circumcision is a terrible travesty, but neither it nor Walker's talent is well served by this overwrought novel.
(Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 1992)



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Possess the secret of joy


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0671789422 : Paperback - Mass Market
0671789457 : Paperback
0151731527 : Hardcover
0671793063 : Cassette - Audio
1568953518 : Hardcover - Large Print


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Temple of my familiar, The
Alice Walker

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

In a story that moves through America, England, and Africa, men, women, and animals share a spiritual world and learn the intricacies of their connecting lives


New York: Washington Square Press, 1997, c1989, 417 p.


Booklist Review: Fans of Walker's The Color Purple [BKL Ap 15 82] who have awaited the author's next novel will find some reassuringly familiar themes and characters within, including two of the writer's more endearing creations--Miss Celie and Shug--and a full measure of Walker's "womanist" prose. The work, unfortunately, doesn't hold together as promised (even Celie and Shug are relegated to cameo roles). There are some reading rewards to be found, especially in several terrific passages that delve historically into black communities in both Africa and the Caribbean. But the shifts into the present time seem contrived when contrasted to the rich oral traditions that Walker has mined so impressively in the past (and with intermittent success here). A book that functions more as a reminder of Walker's talent than as a resounding step forward.--John Brosnahan --

Publishers Weekly Review: Part love story, part fable, part feminist manifesto, part political statement, Walker's new novel follows a cast of interrelated characters, most of them black, and each representing a different ethnic strain--ranging from diverse African tribes to the mixed bloods of Latin America--that contribute to the black experience in America. As each tells of his or her life (and sometimes, previous lives in various reincarnations), Walker relates the damage inflicted on blacks by the oppression of slavery in Africa and in the South, and less visibly but just as invidiously, by the racial prejudice existing today. Because her characters are intrinsically interesting, (one is the granddaughter of Celie from The Color Purple ) this device works most of the time. But when Walker hypothesizes that Western civilization stole and subverted the ancient African deities, metamorphosing their worship of the Mother Goddess into a patriarchal line, the narrative takes on the strident tones of a polemic. Black women have suffered most, is Walker's message, since they were subjugated both by whites and by men. Unfortunately, didacticism mars the narrative; theorizing and pontificating take the place of action. Thus, though it has its own strengths, the book never achieves the narrative power of The Color Purple . 175,000 copy first printing; major ad/promo; BOMC featured alternate; paperback sale to Pocket Books, author tour. (May)

Library Journal Review: Nothing in Walker's extraordinary new novel is fixed. Time and place range from precolonial Africa to post-slavery North Carolina to modern-day San Francisco; and the characters themselves change and evolve as their stories are told, their myriad histories revealed. Most often present are Miss Lissie, an old woman with a fascinating host of former lives; her companion, the gentle Mr. Hal; Arveyda, a soul-searching musician; his wife Carlotta, who was born in the South American jungle; Fanny, a young woman who has a tendency to fall in love with spirits; and her husband Suwelo, who tries hard but simply does not understand her. Out of the telling of their stories emerges a glorious and iridescent fabric, a strand connecting all their lives and former lives and seeming to pull all of existence into its folds. Walker's characters are magnetic, even with their all-to-human flaws and stumblings; they seem to contain the world, and to do it justice. Highly recommended.-- Jessica Grim, NYPL

Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ Walker follows the vast critical and popular success of The Color Purple (1982) with a sprawling mixture of feminism and spirituality centered on six characters searching for their identities and roots. Richly told and full of wonder, it's not so much a novel as an interlinked tapestry of oral tellings that ranges through time and history; too often, though, its overbearing message becomes its medium. Walker's vehicles include Arveyda, a guitarist ("Artists, he now understood, were simply messengers"); Carlotta, his Latin-American wife; Suwelo, a history teacher ("His generation of men had failed women. . .); Fanny, his former wife; Lissie, who can remember her past lives; Hal, her lover; and a group of secondary characters and wisdom figures--including, from The Color Purple, Miss Celie and Miss Shug (a pamphlet, "The Gospel According to Shug," changes the lives of all those who read it). In brief--there are numerous digressions, and the oral tellings emerge from and return to the past--Arveyda marries Carlotta and then makes love to her mother ("exhausted from orgasms that shook her core"); Suwelo inherits a house in Baltimore and meets Hal, then Lissie, whose former lives, some in Africa, are fables of slavery and peace; Fanny recalls Grandmother Celie's words of wisdom, realizes divorce is imminent when Suwelo admits he's too macho to use a shopping-cart, visits Africa (and her father, the playwright Ola), and finally gets together with Arveyda (curious about Africa) in a sauna, where she takes his "candle" in her hand. Carlotta and Suwelo, meanwhile, get together in a hot tub. Consciousness-raisers and New Agers will find this a sweet fairy tale for our times, a fireside reader. Others will enjoy its quirky ebb and flow, but bemoan its smugness and unfortunate tendency to turn characters into mouthpieces.
(Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 1989)



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1. Author Read-Alike - Alice Walker


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1. About Alice Walker : Features Walker's biography and a selected bibliography.


ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0671003763
0671683993 : Paperback - Mass Market
0151885338 : Hardcover
0606045562 : DEMCO Turtleback
0833548042 : Glued Binding
0671688332 : Cassette - Audio
9994495135 : Paperback - Mass Market
0896219291 : Hardcover - Large Print
0896219372 : Paperback - Large Print
078070357X : Glued Binding


Credits:
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• Baker & Taylor
• MetaMetrics, Inc.
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• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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• TID: 060822

There is a flower at the tip of my nose smelling me
by Alice Walker ; illustrated by Stefano Vitale

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

A poem that captures the wonderful interaction between nature and humans with such verses as "There is a sky at the end of my eye seeing me" and "There is a sunrise at the edge of my skin praising me."


New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2006, 32 p.

Publishers Weekly Review: Walker (The Color Purple; Finding the Green Stone) praises the surroundings that fortify the human experience. In her vision, people do not work their will on the things around them, but rather the people and the universe influence each other: "There is a flower/ At the tip/ Of my nose/ Smelling/ Me./ There is a sky/ At the end/ Of my/ Eye/ Seeing/ Me." Vitale (When the Wind Stops) paints great swaths of sunset sky that glow from the horizon, illuminating the serene face of a dreaming girl who looks as if she would be at home anywhere. "There is a dance/ That lives/ In my bones/ Dancing/ Me," reads the text, as the heroine, charged from within by streams of incandescent energy, leaps and sways in swirls of sunlight that stream out from her fingertips. "There is a story/ At the end/ Of my arms," Walker concludes, "Telling/ Me!" Now a rainbow falls over the girl's face, and creation holds out marvelous possibilities. Smaller versions of herself surround the girl in a frieze: in these miniature images she flies, dives into the waves with a fish and climbs the leaves of an enormous white flower to kiss its face. It's less a story than an illuminated prayer???an expression of gratitude for one girl, all humans and the whole of the cosmos. All ages. (Apr.) --Staff (Reviewed May 8, 2006) (Publishers Weekly, vol 253, issue 19, p64)



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Vitale, Stefano: ill

ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0060570806
0060570814


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Third life of Grange Copeland, The

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

In Georgia during the 1920s, Grange Copeland creates and sustains a dream for his granddaughter in the midst of African American dehumanization.


New York: Pocket Books, 1988, copyright 1970, 346p.

Kirkus Reviews This is a harrowingly detailed family saga spanning three generations of Copelands, black Georgia sharecroppers. It focuses on Grange, as husband, father, grandfather, and on his son Brownfield, who suffers the effects of his father's suffering. As a young man Grange cannot overcome his family's deadly circumstances and in a bitter reflex he becomes their tormentor. When it becomes unbearable he deserts them (destroying his wife in the process) to go north where he can be master, if not of himself, at least of his hatred, and returns in time to watch the dissolution of Brownfield's family, the past in hideous parody. In judging Brownfield, as he must, Grange judges his own guilt; and mellowed, with the custody of his small granddaughter Ruth, he undertakes a new life of quiet independence and attention to the responsibilities he now believes to be his. But the affection and joy that blossom between him and the girl are a short-lived, miraculous fluke, and his sense of control is proven illusory when Brownfield, unloving but resentful, and helped by a' white judge, sets out to reclaim his child. The pressures and responses of such beleaguered families are traced step by grim step, with stern sympathy and a clean, functional style.
(Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1970)



Features about this author or title:

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1. About Alice Walker : Features Walker's biography and a selected bibliography.


ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0671745883 : Paperback - Mass Market
0156028360 : Paperback
0743418239 : Paperback
1585473960 : Library binding - Large Print
0156899604 : Paperback
0151899053 : Hardcover


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• American Historical Fiction: An Annotated Guide to Novels for Adults and Young Adults, published by Oryx Press
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 060823

To hell with dying
Illustrated by Catherine Deeter

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

The author relates how old Mr. Sweet, though often on the verge of dying, could always be revived by the loving attention that she and her brother gave him.


Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, copyright 1988, unpaged.

School Library Journal Review: Gr 2-5 Although this book rambles in the fashion of oral narrative, at its center is the narrator's feeling for Mr. Sweet, an elderly friend from her childhood. Dia betic and alcoholic Mr. Sweet is repeat edly recalled from the edge of "death" by the narrator and her brother. Their affectionate need for him works like a charm until his 90th birthday, when the narrator hurries back from the university but is only just recognized before Mr. Sweet is really gone. Mr. Sweet's mor tality is somehow a personal failure as well as a personal loss. This book does not successfully bridge the distance be tween the quality of the author's experi ence and the accessibility of that experi ence to a young audience. Its text, unusually long for a picture book, is di gressive, minimally structured, and sometimes difficult to read aloud. Refer ences to alcoholism, womanizing, ques tionable parentage, and poverty lend a confusing aura of realism to what is es sentially a romanticized tale. The first- person narrator herself seems not to have clarified her own contradictory feelings towards the events she retells. On one page she admits that "these deaths upset me fearfully, and the thought of how much depended on me . . .made me very nervous," while two pages further on she says, " it did not occur to us that we were doing anything special; we had not learned that death was final when it did come." Like the text, the many full-page illustrations are both hyper-realistic and highly roman tic. Poetic pastels, and repeated motifs of flowers, rainbows, and blue skies, balance details of peeling paint and patched clothes. Deeter is a sensitive portraitist and makes the heroine beauti ful through emphasizing her black fea tures. A note of sentimentality in the pictures echoes a similar note, for all the narrator's forthrightness, in the text. Patricia Dooley, formerly at Drexel Uni versity, Philadelphia

Publishers Weekly Review: An adult sensibility infuses this evocative work, which is somewhat long for the picture book format, and more of a memoir than a linear narrative. Deeter's naturalistic paintings fairly burst with color. All ages. (Feb.)

Kirkus Reviews In a short story produced as a picture book, a well-known novelist (The Color Purple) depicts the loving relationship between Mr. Sweet, "a diabetic and an alcoholic and a guitar player," and the girl who narrates the story. From the girl's earliest childhood on, Mr. Sweet, depressed about his failed ambitions, is periodically on the verge of death--but the girl's family always comes up the road to the house on his neglected cotton farm and, with love and cheerful cajolery, talk him out of it. Between these crises, there are joyful, companionable times. Finally, on Mr. Sweet's 90th birthday, as the girl is completing her doctorate, she gets word that Mr. Sweet is dying for the last time--and hurries home from Massachusetts in time for a poignant farewell. Touched with the right sort of sentiment, Walker's story is overflowing with compassion, humor, and good sense. Deeter's framed illustrations, full-page and full-color, are realistic, almost monumental in their simplicity; they sensitively reinforce the wonderful relationship described in the text. A Fine story of deep feeling.
(Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1988)



Features about this author or title:

1. Author Read-Alike - Alice Walker


Author Web Sites:
1. About Alice Walker : Features Walker's biography and a selected bibliography.


Other Contributors:
Deeter, Catherine: illus

ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0152890742 : Paperback - Juvenile
0152890750 : Reinforced binding - Juvenile
0613948874 : Prebind


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• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 100676

Way forward is with a broken heart, The

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

The author presents a collection of short fiction loosely based on her own life, including "To My Young Husband," which describes life amid the turbulence of the Deep South at the dawn of the civil rights movement.


New York: Random House, copyright 2000, 200 p.

Reviews for this Title:

Booklist Review: Part memoir, part fiction, and part bibliotherapy, this collection explores several women's heartfelt (and sometimes heartbreaking) relationships with husbands, friends, lovers of both sexes, and family members across generations. The direct homilies about life and love and the "ecology of the soul" have a greeting-card banality, reminiscent of some slogans from the sixties. And yet, it is that generation's struggle for civil rights and for women's rights that fuels Walker's most moving stories and passionate insights. She grabs you from the start with "To My Young Husband," a memoir of her first marriage to a Jewish civil rights lawyer she met on the picket lines in Mississippi. Her account of their decade of happiness and her enduring grief about their breakup ("Did living interracially wear them out?") is achingly personal. Just as strong are her searing accounts of coming of age in a racist society: her own experiences and those passed on by older family members. One great-aunt, like the Ancient Mariner, had to make everyone listen to her family stories of what it was like to be a woman slave, stories you can never forget. In her various persona, Walker also talks intimately about bisexuality and her surprising discovery that she finds women sexy, even as she still yearns with a broken heart for that first husband. Whether writing about race, sex, class, or romance, she celebrates love that "requires us to become intimate with what is foreign." ((Reviewed August 2000)) -- Hazel Rochman

Publishers Weekly Review: HIn 13 affectionate stories, Walker (The Color Purple; By the Light of My Father's Smile) reflects on the nature of passion and friendship, pondering the emotional trajectories of lives and loves. Some of the pieces are directly autobiographical, as Walker explains in her preface. "To My Young Husband" is about her marriage as a young woman to a Jewish civil rights lawyer and their difficult but mostly happy decade in Mississippi and Brooklyn. Many years later, telling her daughter the story of the marriage, Walker wonders how she and her ex-husband, once so close, could have become such strangers. Other stories are "mostly fiction, but with a definite thread of having come out of a singular life." Old hurts are soothed in "Olive Oil," in which Orelia learns to trust her husband, John, and not visit the sins of the past upon him. In "The Brotherhood of the Saved," Hannah, the lesbian narrator, confronts the bigotry of religion and attempts to save her relationship with her mother, whose fundamentalist church is urging her to ostracize her daughter. A trip to a screening of Deep Throat gets the older woman and two of her friends talking about sex, but true acceptance proves more elusive. Infusing her intimate tales with grace and humor, Walker probes hidden corners of the human experience, at once questioning and acknowledging sexual, racial and cultural rifts. Though a few stories tip into self-indulgence and read less like fiction than personal testimony, this is nonetheless a strong, moving collection. A common theme runs throughoutDwe are all obliged to love and be loved, no matter how blind, inexpert or troublesome we may be. 100,000 first printing; 8-city author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal Review: Love may be a mighty balm, but Walker (The Color Purple) knows that it can also be unsettling, causing both lover and beloved to question their values, politics, and commitments. In seven beautifully written and astoundingly perceptive short stories--admittedly based in fact, then fictionalized--she homes in on the problems endemic to interracial romance and offers a near stream-of-consciousness reflection on her own ten-year marriage to a white civil rights attorney. It is powerful, jarring reading. But Walker treads lightly, conscious that the inevitable disagreements and betrayals that accompany relationships are what make us human. While several of the book's entries examine the problems inherent in black/white coupling, other pieces assess the ways we communicate woman to woman, sister to sister, husband to wife. Throughout, the book remains remarkably upbeat, urging us to chance heartache in order to connect. Brave and passionate, audacious and wise, this is Walker at her best. Highly recommended for all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/00.]--Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews Using the accretion method that has become her trademark, Walker (By the Light of My Father's Smile, 1998, etc.) here offers a many-voiced, often lyrical story—but in discrete, oddly shaped lumps—of her first marriage and subsequent awakenings over the course of a lifetime of relationships.
The first section, "To My Young Husband," is the most vivid and moving, as a woman, Tatala, looks back on her marriage 20 years after it ended, from the vantage point of a therapist's office in Manhattan where she sits with her ex and their daughter, now grown, who has brought them there to figure out what went wrong. The images of the relationship—a man, white, lawyer, Jewish, and a woman, black, poet, married and living in Mississippi in the '60s, just trying to have a normal life together with their child—are poignant, as are the sadness and Tatala's pain that they should have drifted apart. From there the focus keeps shifting: to another woman reflecting on how her family views her as an autobiographical writer, to frank portrayals of other women and the men they love, in spite of the yearnings they have to move on, to a man coping badly with his lover's absence, letting doubt gnaw its way into his heart, and to two sisters looking for the ruin of their uncle's house, a walk taking them back to childhood and a better understanding of who they are now. Finally, the male lovers are replaced by women, and the voices continue to explain the joys of being together, and the hardship of being judged unfairly, until a final voice, the author's own, offers a healing hand and her art to bridge the gap of understanding between herself and the husband of her youth.
Many voices are heard here, and whether they preach or praise, coo or condemn, they all come from one heart.
(Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2000)



Features about this author or title:

1. Author Read-Alike - Alice Walker


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ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0679455876
0345407954 : Paperback
0786233559 : Hardcover - Large Print


Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• Booklist, published by the American Library Association
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• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 060824

You can't keep a good woman down: stories

Author: Walker, Alice, 1944-

Thirteen short stories, including a political dialogue between two young Black women as they meet over the years, explore the Black experience in contemporary America, probing into relations between races and between sexes


New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, c1981, 167 p.

Library Journal Review: Dating back to the early 1970s and 1980s, respectively, these short story collections cover the Pulitzer Prize winner's usual ground.
— Michael Rogers (Reviewed July 15, 2004) (Library Journal, vol 129, issue 12, p127)

Kirkus Reviews A thin, often didactic, largely disappointing collection of stories from an enormously gifted author of short fiction (In Love & Trouble) and novels--whose storytelling powers seem wasted on the generally simple-minded material here. The book's first story, for instance, jumps right off with a dazzlingly convincing narrative voice--that of a black Southern small-town woman--but interest soon sinks as the story's bland premise becomes clear: it's a fictionalized, sentimental little riff on Elvis Presley and the black blues writer-singer whose music helped make him famous (with unsubtle echoes of the familiar exploitation issue). Likewise, a vignette of an elderly black, much-feted writer--which is deliciously told but holds only the most obvious ironies. And most of the more intensely serious stories here appear to sacrifice texture of character and incident to sociological debate-and-discussion: reminiscences of black/white sex during the Civil Rights years; two contrasted black women's lives over the years; a monologue-anecdote about a black woman who kills her white lover/abuser; plus some unabashed propaganda re pornography (with special reference to the portrayal of black women in porn). When concentrating on love and marriage, however, Walker seems to ease off a bit and does some genuine exploring: "The Lover"--about a black woman having an affair with a charming, intellectually petty New York Jew at a writers' colony--is unformed but alive; "Laurel" verges on melodrama--a now-married black woman haunted by her mad, white-country-boy ex-lover--but has undeniable grab; and best of all is "The Abortion," the painful anatomy of a deteriorating marriage. Ragged, often superficial work, then--with more sociological interest (the black/feminist intersection) than literary.
(Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1981)



Features about this author or title:

1. Author Read-Alike - Alice Walker


Author Web Sites:
1. About Alice Walker : Features Walker's biography and a selected bibliography.


ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0156997789 : Paperback
015602862X : Paperback
0833501720 : Prebind - Juvenile


Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• Library Journal, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 060825