Word: poisonwood
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...Poisonwood Bible...
...Congo has been the suffering heart of Africa for more than a century, and its turbulent colonial history has been well documented in novels like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, and in Adam Hochschild's nonfiction King Leopold's Ghost. But the more recent travails of what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo (D.R.C.) have until now been poorly appreciated. And they are apocalyptic. In January, the International Rescue Committee estimated that 5.4 million people have died in the various wars - and their related effects - that have torn through Congo since...
Most readers probably know Kingsolver from the award-winning “Poisonwood Bible,” published two years before “Prodigal Summer.” Like “Poisonwood,” the newer novel explores the relationship between people and the land they live on, this time in southern Appalachia. Kingsolver interweaves three story strands set in the fictional Zebulon County near the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. In this small farming community on the edge of a great forest, the contact between human and nature is still immediate and meaningful...
Barbara Kingsolver's reputation achieved something like critical (and commercial) mass with The Poisonwood Bible (1998). Her three earlier novels, The Bean Trees (1988), Animal Dreams (1990) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), built a considerable readership, particularly among women, as offbeat, eco-feminist romances, and Kingsolver could have gone on repeating the elements that made those books popular: independent females vaguely adrift in the U.S. Southwest with strong views on such matters as honoring Native American rights and sheltering Latin American political refugees. But she extended her range dramatically in Poisonwood, a long, incantatory meditation, filtered through the memories...
...With Poisonwood still riding near the top of paperback charts, thanks at least in part to its June selection by the Oprah Book Club, here comes Kingsolver's new novel, Prodigal Summer (HarperCollins; 444 pages; $26), which is something of a return to the author's earlier form. It is an altogether lighter and more easygoing affair than its immediate predecessor. Its setting has narrowed from the vast heart of Africa to a mountain and valley in southern Appalachia over the course of a single hot and unusually rainy summer. Its subject is not the clash of ideologies...