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The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

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Amazon.com Review

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

From Publishers Weekly

In this risky but resoundingly successful novel, Kingsolver leaves the Southwest, the setting of most of her work (The Bean Trees; Animal Dreams) and follows an evangelical Baptist minister's family to the Congo in the late 1950s, entwining their fate with that of the country during three turbulent decades. Nathan Price's determination to convert the natives of the Congo to Christianity is, we gradually discover, both foolhardy and dangerous, unsanctioned by the church administration and doomed from the start by Nathan's self-righteousness. Fanatic and sanctimonious, Nathan is a domestic monster, too, a physically and emotionally abusive, misogynistic husband and father. He refuses to understand how his obsession with river baptism affronts the traditions of the villagers of Kalinga, and his stubborn concept of religious rectitude brings misery and destruction to all. Cleverly, Kingsolver never brings us inside Nathan's head but instead unfolds the tragic story of the Price family through the alternating points of view of Orleanna Price and her four daughters. Cast with her young children into primitive conditions but trained to be obedient to her husband, Orleanna is powerless to mitigate their situation. Meanwhile, each of the four Price daughters reveals herself through first-person narration, and their rich and clearly differentiated self-portraits are small triumphs. Rachel, the eldest, is a self-absorbed teenager who will never outgrow her selfish view of the world or her tendency to commit hilarious malapropisms. Twins Leah and Adah are gifted intellectually but are physically and emotionally separated by Adah's birth injury, which has rendered her hemiplagic. Leah adores her father; Adah, who does not speak, is a shrewd observer of his monumental ego. The musings of five- year-old Ruth May reflect a child's humorous misunderstanding of the exotic world to which she has been transported. By revealing the story through the female victims of Reverend Price's hubris, Kingsolver also charts their maturation as they confront or evade moral and existential issues and, at great cost, accrue wisdom in the crucible of an alien land. It is through their eyes that we come to experience the life of the villagers in an isolated community and the particular ways in which American and African cultures collide. As the girls become acquainted with the villagers, especially the young teacher Anatole, they begin to understand the political situation in the Congo: the brutality of Belgian rule, the nascent nationalism briefly fulfilled in the election of the short-lived Patrice Lumumba government, and the secret involvement of the Eisenhower administration in Lumumba's assassination and the installation of the villainous dictator Mobutu. In the end, Kingsolver delivers a compelling family saga, a sobering picture of the horrors of fanatic fundamentalism and an insightful view of an exploited country crushed by the heel of colonialism and then ruthlessly manipulated by a bastion of democracy. The book is also a marvelous mix of trenchant character portrayal, unflagging narrative thrust and authoritative background detail. The disastrous outcome of the forceful imposition of Christian theology on indigenous natural faith gives the novel its pervasive irony; but humor is pervasive, too, artfully integrated into the children's misapprehensions of their world; and suspense rises inexorably as the Price family's peril and that of the newly independent country of Zaire intersect. Kingsolver moves into new moral terrain in this powerful, convincing and emotionally resonant novel. Agent, Frances Goldin; BOMC selection; major ad/promo; author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Series: Oprah's Book Club

Hardcover: 560 pages

Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (October 7, 1998)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0060175400

ISBN-13: 978-0060175405

Product Dimensions:

6.1 x 1.6 x 9.2 inches

Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.5 out of 5 stars

2,550 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#21,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

So many people are judging this book based on their personal feelings about a certain subject, mostly Christianity or America. But I'm giving my review based on the story and writing. Both were excellent. It was a great story and it made you question everything you've ever thought or believed. Did BK have an agenda, of course. It was obvious. But it didn't sway my opinion of the writing or the story. There are two reasons I'm not giving this a 5 star. 1 - she contradicts her agenda more than once. At times Africa is nothing but innocent, then she goes on to tell stories of how they kill and maim, and are just as human as everyone else on the planet. 2 - I feel, and quite frankly this is a first for me, that she took the story too far. Reading on a kindle, I don't know how many pages a book is. And I love that. Some books will seem daunting based solely on their size, It can discourage a lot of people from reading it. (Example, Cutting for Stone - for me 5 stars and still my favorite book to date) But I digress. I still felt she could have wrapped up this story after they left the village but before we got fully engulfed into their adult lives - that portion just didn't capture me as a reader. All said, it was an excellent read and I will recommend it as one of my favorites.

I teach this novel in a course for college juniors and seniors. Iâ€™ve just finished reading it for the fifth time. It remains one of my favorite contemporary novels, a brilliant, evocative, beautifully written tour-de-force. It is novel about experience, growth, the resiliency of women, the harshness of a world with little justice, and the inevitability of change. Set in the Congo of the the 1960s-1980s, it recounts the terrible history of imperialism, universal quest for freedom, and strength of tradition and spiritual bonds. The ultimate religion, Kingsolver believes, is the embrace of nature, and acceptance that we, too, are part of a living, biological world, past and present, whose muntu (being) we share.My students love this novel. I look forward each time spring semester to rereading a wonderful book and introducing 20 or so undergraduates to Kingsolverâ€™s work. Five stars (one for each of the five Price women).

I am very skeptical of books written about Africa by non Africans. I believe that our own people should be the voice of the continent. This is not the case with this book. It is an humorous, tragic, heart-rending, intricately woven tale. Kingsolver is phenomenally talented and her gift shines through the Poisonwood Bible. Several years after a good friend first lent it to me, it is still my most revered and recommended novel. This volume was a gift to my mother in law and I even liked the revised cover.

This is a beautifully written book with inspired prose and deep insights. It looks at Africa and Africans with open eyes and a sensitivity to their heritage and culture. It also examines the role of missionaries in Africa, some of whom are good and some terrible. It is not a book for the deeply religious who cannot stand to see their own beliefs challenged or to acknowledge that there are other belief systems out there that are held just as dearly by their followers.I would like to site some of my favorite passages.I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.Mama says their skin bears scars different from ours because their skin is a map of all the sorrows in their lives.I pictured hands like those digging diamonds out of the Congo dirt and go to thinking, Gee, does Marilyn Monroe even know where they come from? Just picturing her in thr stain gown and a COngolese diamond digger int he same universe gave me the weebie jeebies. So I didn't think about it anymore.God doesn't need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.There are a lot of other passages and verbal images that I loved but I can't copy the whole book here. However, there is one last thing I want to say and this is a complaint.Here is the quote:A parasite of humans that extinguished us altogether, you see, would quickly be laid to rest in human graves, So the race between predator and prey remains exquisitely neck and neck.As always, it is impossible for people to understand evolution. This passage was supposed to have been said by a researcher at the CDC. It fails to understand that evolution is not forward looking. It is highly likely that this scenario has played out over the millennium for species that no longer exist. In fact, the Tasmanian devil is currently facing extinction from a viral form of cancer that fits this description. This kind of thing is more likely in small populations where genetic diversity is limited. Probably the human race has little to fear on this account.

This book started slow for me, but it soon began to capture my attention. The characters are well developed and very complex. The story is engrossing...the struggles of a white mission family in the Belgian Congo in the 1950's. It is told alternately by the wife and daughters of an pious but abusive husband and father. It follows the characters over several years and describes the impact that time in the Congo had on their lives as some return to the US and others remain in Africa through the rebellion and beyond.

This came to me as one of the "got to read this book some time in your life" and I agree. Poignant, incredibly perceptive with its occasional glimpses into African, world and religious politics of the day (gave me a different view of colonial Africa I can tell you!), beautiful writing and very real characters that just carried me along. Emotionally engrossing - I wanted to slap him and carry them all away....

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