In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
Author: Alice Walker
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker's collection of essays ranging in topics from personal to political. Thoughtful, intelligent, resonant musings. -- Kirkus Reviews
In this, her first collection of nonfiction, Alice Walker speaks out as a black woman, writer, mother, and feminist. Among the thirty-six pieces are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter's healing words.
The essays are organized into four different sections, and together these sections provide a sense of Walker’s complex personality and varied engagements in the world. The first section of essays deals primarily with Walker’s influences and concerns as a fiction writer. The essays cover writers who have influenced her, such as Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston, and discuss the complex struggles involved in finding influences and establishing an identity as an African-American writer, such as in “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience.”
The second section of essays is more focused on Walker’s politics. A number of essays in this section deal with Martin Luther King, Jr., an important figure in Walker’s life—as in, “Choice: a Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.” and “Choosing to Stay at Home: Ten Years after the March on Washington”—as well as with Walker’s interest in socialism, such as “Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest” and “My Father’s Country is the Poor.”
The third section of the book covers some of the political strife within Walker’s African-American community—as in “Breaking Chains and Encouraging Life” and “If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?”—while the final section of the book can be seen as an overview of the previous three sections. The latter essays vary widely in topic and tone, from the intimate and personal—“When the Other Dancer is the Self”—to the global and political, as in “Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do.”
The sections in this book deal broadly with different topics, yet there is also a linkage between these topics. Discussing her influences as a fiction writer, as she does in her essays on O’Connor and Hurston, inevitably leads Walker to the topic of social injustice and particularly racism in the American South.
Author: Alice Walker
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker's collection of essays ranging in topics from personal to political. Thoughtful, intelligent, resonant musings. -- Kirkus Reviews
In this, her first collection of nonfiction, Alice Walker speaks out as a black woman, writer, mother, and feminist. Among the thirty-six pieces are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter's healing words.
The essays are organized into four different sections, and together these sections provide a sense of Walker’s complex personality and varied engagements in the world. The first section of essays deals primarily with Walker’s influences and concerns as a fiction writer. The essays cover writers who have influenced her, such as Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston, and discuss the complex struggles involved in finding influences and establishing an identity as an African-American writer, such as in “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience.”
The second section of essays is more focused on Walker’s politics. A number of essays in this section deal with Martin Luther King, Jr., an important figure in Walker’s life—as in, “Choice: a Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.” and “Choosing to Stay at Home: Ten Years after the March on Washington”—as well as with Walker’s interest in socialism, such as “Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest” and “My Father’s Country is the Poor.”
The third section of the book covers some of the political strife within Walker’s African-American community—as in “Breaking Chains and Encouraging Life” and “If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?”—while the final section of the book can be seen as an overview of the previous three sections. The latter essays vary widely in topic and tone, from the intimate and personal—“When the Other Dancer is the Self”—to the global and political, as in “Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do.”
The sections in this book deal broadly with different topics, yet there is also a linkage between these topics. Discussing her influences as a fiction writer, as she does in her essays on O’Connor and Hurston, inevitably leads Walker to the topic of social injustice and particularly racism in the American South.
Author: Alice Walker
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker's collection of essays ranging in topics from personal to political. Thoughtful, intelligent, resonant musings. -- Kirkus Reviews
In this, her first collection of nonfiction, Alice Walker speaks out as a black woman, writer, mother, and feminist. Among the thirty-six pieces are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter's healing words.
The essays are organized into four different sections, and together these sections provide a sense of Walker’s complex personality and varied engagements in the world. The first section of essays deals primarily with Walker’s influences and concerns as a fiction writer. The essays cover writers who have influenced her, such as Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston, and discuss the complex struggles involved in finding influences and establishing an identity as an African-American writer, such as in “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience.”
The second section of essays is more focused on Walker’s politics. A number of essays in this section deal with Martin Luther King, Jr., an important figure in Walker’s life—as in, “Choice: a Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.” and “Choosing to Stay at Home: Ten Years after the March on Washington”—as well as with Walker’s interest in socialism, such as “Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest” and “My Father’s Country is the Poor.”
The third section of the book covers some of the political strife within Walker’s African-American community—as in “Breaking Chains and Encouraging Life” and “If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?”—while the final section of the book can be seen as an overview of the previous three sections. The latter essays vary widely in topic and tone, from the intimate and personal—“When the Other Dancer is the Self”—to the global and political, as in “Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do.”
The sections in this book deal broadly with different topics, yet there is also a linkage between these topics. Discussing her influences as a fiction writer, as she does in her essays on O’Connor and Hurston, inevitably leads Walker to the topic of social injustice and particularly racism in the American South.
About the Author:
ALICE WALKER is an internationally celebrated writer, poet, and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children's books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award.
