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A review by expendablemudge
Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
5.0
Rating: 5* of five
On my birthday in 1999, I got a call from a childhood friend informing me that my mother had had a debilitating stroke. I started planning my trip back to my hometown, calling in favors and loans and generally mobilizing my support system. I was on a plane two weeks later, accompanied by this book.
It was a godsend. A story I knew told by a storyteller I trusted. My next two months were complicated and unpleasant, involving upheavals, betrayals, endings, and beginnings that contained the seeds of their endings. Throughout, I was ministered to by Russell Banks. The time I spent reading this book, so extremely slow by my personal standards, was time well spent and deeply savored. My friend Mark Freeburg recently picked this book up and decided to read it, so I thought I'd revisit some of my favorite moments.
How I wish today's christians thought this way, and acted on the principles they claim to venerate.
Because this is the simplest statement of a truth I've held dear all my life.
Yes indeed. As we saw a year ago.
I'd like to have this printed on the hundred-dollar bill.
So my trip back through the book, even though it falls short of a full re-read, has been deeply and satisfyingly full of moment and meaning.
On my birthday in 1999, I got a call from a childhood friend informing me that my mother had had a debilitating stroke. I started planning my trip back to my hometown, calling in favors and loans and generally mobilizing my support system. I was on a plane two weeks later, accompanied by this book.
It was a godsend. A story I knew told by a storyteller I trusted. My next two months were complicated and unpleasant, involving upheavals, betrayals, endings, and beginnings that contained the seeds of their endings. Throughout, I was ministered to by Russell Banks. The time I spent reading this book, so extremely slow by my personal standards, was time well spent and deeply savored. My friend Mark Freeburg recently picked this book up and decided to read it, so I thought I'd revisit some of my favorite moments.
It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution!
Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!
How I wish today's christians thought this way, and acted on the principles they claim to venerate.
Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.
Because this is the simplest statement of a truth I've held dear all my life.
“You must not obey a majority, no matter how large, if it opposes your principles and opinions." He said this to each new volunteer and repeated it over and over to him, until it was engraved on his mind. "The largest majority is often only an organized mob whose noise can no more change the false into the true than it can change black into white or night into day. And a minority, conscious of its rights, if those rights are based on moral principles, will sooner or later become a just majority.”
Yes indeed. As we saw a year ago.
Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.
I'd like to have this printed on the hundred-dollar bill.
So my trip back through the book, even though it falls short of a full re-read, has been deeply and satisfyingly full of moment and meaning.