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Anything We Love Can Be Saved
by Alice Walker
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Ballantine Books (1998-04-07)
ISBN: 0345407962
EAN: 9780345407962
Dewy Decimal #: 818.5408
Paperback: 256 pages
Release Date: 1998-04-07
SKU: BX026-10
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: Clean and shiny. Tanning on pg edges o/wise very minor wear. Spine uncreased, pgs crisp, clean, tight, unmarked.
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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.com
Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, is an international activist and self-professed womanist. This pleasing collection of short essays amounts to a very personal stroll through her psyche. Sharing touchstones and demons, she serves up a spirited defense of Winnie Mandela, accused of taking part in kidnapping and torture; a quest to mark the grave of Zora Neale Hurston, an "African AmerIndian" folklorist who chronicled the lives of Southern American blacks in the 1920s and '30s; poignant, angry witnesses at a conference in Ghana devoted to stopping female genital mutilation; and life lessons her daughter taught her. Walker's opinions are enriched by her poetry and highlighted by the whimsical phrases and titles with which she frames serious subjects.
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Product Description
In Anything We Love Can Be Saved, Alice Walker writes about her life as an activist, in a book rich in the belief that the world is saveable, if only we will act. Speaking from her heart on a wide range of topics--religion and the spirit, feminism and race, families and identity, politics and social change--Walker begins with a moving autobiographical essay in which she describes her own spiritual growth and roots in activism. She goes on to explore many important private and public issues: being a daughter and raising one, dreadlocks, banned books, civil rights, and gender communication. She writes about Zora Neale Hurston and Salman Rushdie and offers advice to Bill Clinton. Here is a wise woman's thoughts as she interacts with the world today, and an important portrait of an activist writer's life.
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Customer Reviews
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Pagan to its Core!
Rating  (5)
Date: 2006-12-04
2 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is one of the most wonderful books I have ever read. Anybody who wants to know anything about the soul of Paganism should burn all of their "So You Want to be A Wiccan" trash and read Anything We Love Can Be Saved. Walker's connection to the land, to Mother Earth, and to Spirit is as Pagan as it gets. This book is profoundly beautiful, profoundly Pagan. She understands that we belong to this wonderful planet, and that real worship of deity is not possible unless we're free, including free to explore and revel in our sexuality. She understands our connectedness to other animals, the nonhuman ones, and espouses their humane treatment as well.
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Hope Doesn't Spring Eternal Without Human Compassion, Desires, and Activism
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-10-31
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Alice Walker writes ideas I don't already know, and she gives me new ways of interpreting people. She is worth considering, especially when you think you disagree with her. It is better to engage her in thoughtful debate than to not listen to what she has to say. Ms. Walker did not title this book "Anything I Love Can Be Saved." Importantly, she chose "Anything WE Love Can Be Saved." The book discusses pursuits she has shared with others.
"Now I know that . . .activism is often my muse . . . All we own, at least for the short time we have it, is our life . . . Whenever I experience evil, and it is not, unfortunately, uncommon to experience it in these times, my deepest feeling is disappointment. I have learned to accept the fact that we risk disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, every time we act. Every time we decide to believe the world can be better. Every time we decide to trust others to be as noble as we think they are. And that there might be years during which our grief is equal to, or even greater than, our hope. The alternative, however, not to act, and therefore to miss experiencing other people at their best, reaching toward their fullness, has never appealed to me." pp. xxiv-xxv.
I've spent a good deal of time researching concepts of love. Many people are familiar with Paul's description of love's attributes from 1 Corinthians 13. Alice Walker highlights the next chapter's oppression of women in the verses of 1 Corinthians 14:33-35. "For God is not a God of disorder but of peace. As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church." I have to agree with Ms. Walker's assertion that the Bible was written by men. And I doubt any intelligent "god" would seek any "peace" that silences women or dictates they become intellectual subordinates to their husbands. As I have grown older, I've found more community and guidance from the voices of women.
"If the women of the world were comfortable, this would be a comfortable world."
To understand what the title of this book might be saying, a person must interpret how Alice Walker is using the word "saved." "Saved" is a word I have trouble with because I grew up in a religious community where a person could only be "saved" by choosing one being and one way. Seeking additional voices or additional community was "fallen" or "depraved." Alice Walker does not appear to be primarily be using the word "saved" in the commonly connotated evangelical "conversion to more enlightened path" sense. She is also not primarily using the word "saved" to promote "possession or acquisition of" another human being.
Ms. Walker emphasizes "saved" in the sense that any person, idea, or object of good character can be remembered, preserved, nourished, grown, and sheltered by love. She says "love and justice and truth are the only monuments that generate everwidening circles of energy and life . . . though trashed and trampled, generation after generation."
She discusses principles of preserving and sharing past loves in relation to recounting how written word efforts and community acknowledgement have honored Zora Neale Hurston, a woman who herself wrote in order to honor and preserve the often concealed, but discretely passed down, African American culture that survived hundreds of years of slavery and discriminatory religious & cultural practices.
Zora also wrote to preserve the memory of specific loves from her personal history. In Zora's work, Alice found a character named Shug, Alice's "outside" grandmother, her grandfather's lover, whose descendant Alice was named after. And if you've read or watched The Color Purple, you are familiar with Shug. There are real people behind most great literary characters.
Alice believes in preserving and sharing the good qualities of those who were unjustly dishonored and have passed from view. Her essay "Anything We Love Can Be Saved" was an address she gave at the the First Annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival in 1990, a festival bringing attention to and honoring the writings of Zora Neal Hurston. Injustice is not overcome through silence. As the subtitle of this book "A Writer's Activism" emphasizes, love is active, notorious, and publicized. The act of love may start "First in their own hearts," but it must be communicated to and shared with "the hearts of others. They have only to make their love inseparable from their belief. And both inseparable from hard work . . . Paying homage to her, memorializing her light, her struggle . . . brought us peace."
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Sadness, not Depression
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-10-30
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I am a lonely and sad person regularly. I would not describe myself as depressed, because depression too often has a meaning that the person is down due to misunderstanding. My sadness is borne out of knowing that worthwhile ideas, methods, and interactions exist, and knowing I am no longer able to participate with them. (Which ironically is an underestimated and underdiagnosed cause of real, clinical depression.)
When I get too sad, I pick up a book like this one by an author who has an insightful & challenging voice. When I feel an absence of someone challenging me with new & good ideas, I pretend that instead of just reading Ms. Walker's books - I pretend she is in the room with me discussing her radical ideas and intent on keeping me company with her arousing ideals. I imagine she appreciates attentive feedback, and a willingness to thoroughly consider all her ideas, even when she is angry.
And when I pause between ideas, I dream of a world that doesn't exist. I dream that most people would choose to act in ways similar to Ms. Walker. I allow myself to fantasize that most parents might choose to be less hypocritical and would agree to say for the sake of their daughters, "all I can promise her is not to lie" even if it "is painful to her, I believe nonetheless it is better than a lie. Surely better than the lies I was told - 'for my own good' - only to sniff them out eventually and become entangled in them."
Then I get a peaceful, easy feeling and like a mad one, I choose to live as if "love is best expressed through truth," "Because to me, it is precisely our personal memories of joy and delight in each other and our present passions and loves that sustain us." p. 66
And like Ms. Walker, I stubbornly refuse to forget or to pretend those memories never occured. It is a lonely refusal. It may be an unwise refusal. But it is a less unhealthy refusal for me than hypocrisy. It is not a raging refusal (as Ms. Walker indicates it is in her at times). And it is not a depressed refusal. It is a clear, conscious, chosen & sad refusal. And in that existence, I thank Ms. Walker for her ideas, her stubborn voice, her words against likely failures, and in my imaginary world - her companionship.
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I love this book.
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-05-02
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
I want to be Alice Walker when I grow up, too bad that job has already been taken.
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Thought Provoking
Rating (5)
Date: 2000-11-28
4 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is a very interesting book. One of the things that I enjoy most about Walker's writing is her ability to convey her perspective of the world. I esspecially liked the first two essay's, and the essay on her cat. I don't agree with absolutly all of Walker's points (Though I do agree with most of them), but this does nothing to undermine the power of the book. The book is sub-titled "A Writer's Activism" and it left me thinking about the place of activism in my own life. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone with an open mind, especially when read in conjunction with Walker's book of short stories, "You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down".
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