A Lesson Before Dying (Oprah's Book Club) Download

ISBN: 0375702709
Title: A Lesson Before Dying (Oprah's Book Club) Pdf
Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Published Date: 1994
Page: 256

Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 1997: In a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone bad; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not pulled the trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of the verdict or the penalty. "I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be..." So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines's powerful exploration of race, injustice, and resistance, A Lesson Before Dying. If young Jefferson, the accused, is confined by the law to an iron-barred cell, Grant Wiggins is no less a prisoner of social convention. University educated, Grant has returned to the tiny plantation town of his youth, where the only job available to him is teaching in the small plantation church school. More than 75 years after the close of the Civil War, antebellum attitudes still prevail: African Americans go to the kitchen door when visiting whites and the two races are rigidly separated by custom and by law. Grant, trapped in a career he doesn't enjoy, eaten up by resentment at his station in life, and angered by the injustice he sees all around him, dreams of taking his girlfriend Vivian and leaving Louisiana forever. But when Jefferson is convicted and sentenced to die, his grandmother, Miss Emma, begs Grant for one last favor: to teach her grandson to die like a man. As Grant struggles to impart a sense of pride to Jefferson before he must face his death, he learns an important lesson as well: heroism is not always expressed through action--sometimes the simple act of resisting the inevitable is enough. Populated by strong, unforgettable characters, Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying offers a lesson for a lifetime. "This majestic, moving novel is an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives." —Chicago Tribune"A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer." — Boston Globe"Enormously moving. . . . Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes." —Los Angeles Times“A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“This majestic, moving novel is an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives.”—Chicago Tribune

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, A Lesson Before Dying is a deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting.

From the critically acclaimed author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

A time to kneel, a time to stand, a time to walk I really liked this book and how it told a story of a Black man falsely accused and sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit but it told so much more about courage, strength, intelligence, morals, ethics, and manhood as a black man. It spoke to the vicious cycle of the absence of the black male in the black community and how we have lost so much as a people since slavery. Yet through the pain of it all God still provides us an opportunity to kneel and reach out to Him for strength for God also lost his child by execution due to a false accusation, God has also given us the will to stand and the power to walk in the face of adversity. WE MUST CHIP AWAY AT THE MYTHS LEFT BEHIND FROM SLAVERY AND ANCIENT & PRESENT RACIST BELIEFS AND WE MUST WALK WITH OUR HEADS HELD HIGH AND FOREVER FIGHT TO PROVE WE ARE WORTHY UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH!!!!!Thank you Mr. Gaines for this lesson!!!!A great book about how to face death and life in the south as it was This is a deep book concerning the life of a young boy on death row and the man who visited him till this happened. It also lets you know what life was like for the negro in the south in the 1950's. The is done in a very indirect way but it is effective.I makes you think of many things-death,and lifehow do we want to deal with any of it. Something we don't think about enough,I think.I enjoy reading the novels that are assigned to my daughter's ... For the most part, I enjoy reading the novels that are assigned to my daughter's literature classes. In 7th grade, they were assigned, "To Kill A Mockingbird." I hadn't recalled the details, so I was very interested in the assignments. As a prelude to her 9th grade literature class, my daughter has to read, "A Lesson Before Dying" over the summer. I read it so that we can discuss it while she completes the summer assignment (she hasn't read it yet!). I could hardly put the book down. It felt familiar to me, a 65-year-old African American woman. I never lived full-time in the segregated south, but I spent enough time visiting grandparents while growing up and hearing stories of that time period.I "felt" the characters in the book and by the time the book ended I could almost cry. I was sad but proud at the same time. I was proud of the conflicted young teacher who was able to reach the young prisoner how to become a man before dying, and how both of them could be good examples of manhood in their poor country community. They actually learned something from each other. I was also proud of how the black community came together to show love and respect for the young man who had to die because of the racism in society.

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