FEATURED BOOK REVIEW OF THE MONTH by Mary Kanous
The Help
By: Kathryn Stockett
This impelling first novel for Kathryn Stockett takes place in Mississippi in the year 1962. It is about the lives of three unforgettable women. The first is Skeeter, she has just returned home from college and her beloved maid Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. Skeeter's mother wants Skeeter married off, but will not tell Skeeter what she has done to Constantine. The second character is Aibileen, a black maid who is “raising” her seventeenth white child, and lastly, there is Minnie, another black maid, perhaps the sassiest women in town. The lives of these three women come together after tragedy strikes the black community and they meet, secretly on a project that will put all three of them, and their respective communities at risk. Each character became my favorite until the next one takes over again. This book is deeply moving, filled with love and suffering, hatred and faith, fear and courage. It is a beautiful book, unforgettable!
Previous Review:
No Turning Back
My Summer with Daddy King
By Gurdon Brewster
Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007
It was a different world in the summer of 1969, especially for Gurdon Brewster, a young, white seminary student from Union Theological Seminary in New York. He volunteered to spend the summer at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, through the seminary’s Student Interracial Ministry. Ebenezer was the home church of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his father, Martin Luther King, Sr., usually referred to as Daddy King. In this life changing memoir, Brewster describes his summer as a pastoral intern at Ebenezer and as a lodger in Daddy King’s home.
Never before in the minority, Brewster is one of two white members of Ebenezer, allowing him to feel and view how it is to be racially different. But the profound and overriding theme weaving throughout this book is what Brewster discovers about the racial inequalities in the South during the Sixties. Just one example happens early in the book when Brewster chaperones the Ebenezer Youth Group on a sweltering day in downtown Atlanta. Brewster suggests they go into the lunch counter at Rich’s Department Store.
“I beckoned for them to come in, to sit next to me in the seats I was now saving…but they didn’t come…
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Laura answered in a whisper, as the shadow of embarrassment swallowed up her face, ‘We can’t go in there. We can’t sit with you at that lunch counter.” (14)
The book is full of these awakenings for Brewster, as well as the reader. Often Martin Luther King, Jr., Big Daddy or other Ebenezer members will offer sage civil rights insights. The memoir also gives a sweet, homely glimpse into life with Daddy King: cranking peach ice cream, cooking grits for every breakfast, and especially learning to preach “from the heart.”
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