Word: poisonwood
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Dates: during 1998-1998
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This year's final issue will appear in May, Rosenbaum said. Titles reviewed in upcoming issues of the Book Review will include From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender in Computer Games, edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver...
...forest: monkeys, army ants, poisonous frogs. Below, on a path, a woman and four girls, all in shirtwaist dresses. "Seen from above this way," writes novelist Barbara Kingsolver at the outset of The Poisonwood Bible (HarperCollins; 546 pages; $26), "they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve." Fair warning, though what the reader must decide before finishing this turbulent, argumentative narrative goes beyond judging four white American daughters and their mother, set down deep in the Congo in the precarious year...
...insists on river baptisms though crocodiles lurk in the river. Fittingly, though he does not understand this, the Congolese word batiza means both baptism and, pronounced differently, terrify. Worse, "Tata Jesus is bangala," as Price mispronounces it, means not Father Jesus is precious but Father Jesus is a poisonwood tree...
...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, Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven, in which social issues involving Native Americans remained mostly in the background. The clear intent of The Poisonwood Bible is to offer Nathan Price's patriarchal troublemaking as an example in miniature of historical white exploitation of black Africa. Kingsolver, 43, lived in the Congo in the early '60s, and fondly remembers the people and the terrain. But this is a novel, not travel writing salted with guilt...