Books: Oprah's Book Club Picks

Cry, the Beloved Country
List Price: $15.00
Now! Offer Price: $9.45
Binding: Paperback, 320 pages

Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s. The book is written with such keen empathy and understanding that to read it is to share fully in the gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the dignity of mankind. Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic tale, passionately African, timeless and universal, and beyond all, selfless.

A Book Worthy of its Praise - Customer
With this book Mr. Paton gives us an inside look at South African apartheid in the 1940's. We live this story through the eyes of a poor Zulu pastor who decides to travel from his small village to Johannesburg in hopes to save his son from mounting troubles. The migration of gold mine workers to the cities has increased the crime rate due to the separation of families. Exploitation of these laborers has caused a political unrest in Johannesburg.

Stephen Kumalo, our Zulu pastor, has to question his own parenting and lifestyle when he sees the poor decision making of his own son. Stephen meets a varied barrage of people, some who help and some who choose silence as the easiest way to stay out of trouble, when searching for his son.

CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY is a must read book. The story gave me insight on this foreign culture and the hardships experienced by not only the exploited workers of the South African gold mines, but the destroyed families of said workers. This book is mandatory criterion for schools in South Africa and it is worthy of this praise.
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THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTERList Price: $12.00
Now! Offer Price: $9.00
Binding: Paperback, 359 pages

With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty. Richard Wright praised Carson McCullers for her ability "to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness." She writes "with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming," said the NEW YORK TIMES. McCullers became an overnight literary sensation, but her novel has endured, just as timely and powerful today as when it was first published. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER is Carson McCullers at her most compassionate, endearing best.

The New York Times : "A remarkable book . . . [McCullers] writes with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming."

The Nation : "Quite remarkable . . . McCullers leaves her characters hauntingly engraved in the reader's memory."

New Republic : "To me the most impressive aspect of 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter' is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race." -- Richard Wright

Saturday Review : "One cannot help remarking that this is an extraordinary novel to have been written by a young woman of twenty-two; but the more important fact is that it is an extraordinary novel in its own right, considerations of authorship apart." -- Saturday Review of Literature

Boston Globe : "[McCullers] writes with a calm and factual realism, and with a deep and abiding insight into human psychology. She does so without an iota of vulgarity and bawdiness, in a manner which many a present day novelist would do well to study."

The Chicago Tribune : "There is not only the delicately sensed need that one might expect youth to know but an even more delicately sensed ironic knowledge."
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