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Title: By the Light of My Father's Smile : A Novel by Alice Walker ISBN: 0-345-42606-1 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 31 August, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.1 (42 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Pure Passion and Poetry
Comment: My third Alice Walker book, and I was surprised by how much I loved it. Better than Temple of My Familiar and as engrossing as The Color Purple, I found myself on a sensual journey, guided by pained characters who became enlightened along the journey as well. Walker writes with poetic fluidity. Her talent is admirable, to say the least, and I finish the book with a desire to read more of her works.
Rating: 4
Summary: Bravely done and extremely needed but ...
Comment: This book gathers up so much of women's history and experience, all previously ignored or misrepresented and takes this history/experience as an important given, uses it to explain our human quest to seek sexual and spiritual fulfillment, to know ourselves. Speaking so honestly about female sexual hurt, female sexual maiming, female sexual shaming within the family, within the father/daughter relationship and imagining a way to heal this experience was powerfully brave of Walker. I felt like I was is a long darkened and forbidden room now amazingly and lovingly explored, revealed. I felt such relief to read this attempt at restoring female sexuality to an altar of acceptance, respect, love, social esteem. It seemed almost possible to live in a society, a family that really could anticipate female sexuality with joy, freedom and respect on an equal footing with male sexual importance. But my awe and gratitude for the subject and Walker's attempt is still tempered by my real sense, in the reading of it, that it was not entirely successful. I'm not sure why. Some of the sexual imagery, the dominating type sexual play in some scenes seemed artificial, unreal. If it were real, it wouldn't be so undisturbing to the participants, it would raise issues, it would be unsettling, not just accepted as part of their sexual bliss identity. But over all, the story reads like a fable, a fairy tale, really and that is fine with me. We need this new kind of fairy tale and fable.
Rating: 4
Summary: Not for everyone!
Comment: Alice Walker is one of those writers whose work has the power to reach out and touch you when you need it most. This and I believe many of her other works are meant to be read at certain critical points in a specific persons life. Points when it is necessary to come to terms with a particular complex of issues. I thought it was telling when one reviewer said that the pre-occupation by some of the characters in this book with their personal traumas was unrealistic. Trauma is by its very nature pre-occupying. And what becomes lodged in an individual persons psyche as a result of the trauma they have experienced is typically unique to that individual (no one can judge the magnitude of pain in anothers heart). As a person who has been hurt reading the words of Alice Walker not only lets me know that another is serving as a witness to my pain it also shows me that there is joy waiting behind a door that I hadn't even realized existed. And it is in those moments that I feel truly blessed my her writing. Perhaps this and her other works are not perfect, in truth they are not. But in that moment when she has captured the pain in ones heart and soul, given it voice and a means to move forward who cares if it isn't the perfect novel? I guess those who haven't felt the coldness of a heart alone and bereft. For my part I say thank you Alice and keep writing, at least for me!
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Title: The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart by Alice Walker ISBN: 0345407954 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 02 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker ISBN: 0671683993 Publisher: Pocket Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1990 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down by Alice Walker ISBN: 0156997789 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 05 March, 1982 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison ISBN: 0452269571 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: March, 1993 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Raising Fences: A Black Man's Love Story (Today Show Book Club #4) by Michael Datcher ISBN: 1573223301 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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