Customer Reviews

Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism

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i love alice walker, but i didn't get what i expected out of this book. i got more. it was so interesting, i read it in a day, causing people to ask me if i had something "due" (i'm a college student) soon. she's involved in some of the same issues that are important to me, including female genital mutilation. she presents the issues clearly and fairly, and gives her opinions on them. she also includes a theory of hers which i found so amazing i could not stop thinking about it for days on end (involving "mammy" dolls and marilyn monroe). i would recommend this book to anyone, but especially women. also, this book includes two of my favorite walker poems, "be nobody's darling" and "never offer your heart to someone who eats hearts", which i thought of as an added bonus.

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.

This book of short stories, letters, and poems captures the soul and hear of its readers. I read the letter to President Clinton over and over. I first heard this letter read by Ms. Walker at a speech she gave at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and I was deeply moved. One does not realize the affects of the embargo against Cuba until reading this moving piece. I can hear her words over and over each time I read it. Also, her poems are always a MUST! This book is simply a classic that can be read for years to come!

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.

That is how I feel about Alice Walker's book. I read it everyday on my lunch hour and I marked passages that were important to me. I want my daughter to read this book. One day her boyfriend got mad at her because she did not know what happened in the civil war. She knows thousands of other things - for example, she wants to spend part of her life trying to help AIDS babies - she just did not know why that was so important to her boyfriend. He has lived a different view of life than she has and I think that seeing things through Alice's eyes, the black experience for want of a better way of expressing what I am trying to say, will help her see and understand. I know what it is to be a woman and to feel the many things that I have felt in my life that have beat me down but I don't know it from Alice's perspective and I see things in such new ways after reading her book. I found her in an Anthropology class when I read Possessing the Secret of Joy....I was 48 then and I did not know there was such a thing as genital mutilation. I could not get over the horror of it. I read it, bought a hard copy, and also purchased warrior marks. I admire her work so much. She and Frida Kahlo are the top women on my list of women to hear. Don't miss this book!!

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".

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."

I want to be Alice Walker when I grow up, too bad that job has already been taken.

I absolutely loved this book and have loved its author for many years, but this edition was terribly put together. Entire passages cut off mid-page, only to pick up several pages later when the author had already moved onto a different subject. In a longer title this wouldn't have been much of a problem, but with the short pieces I felt that I was missing the entire context of the essay. There were also several noticeable typos and grammatical errors. I'm sure this wasn't Walker's doing, so whoever copyedited/proofread this book should have been fired, especially considering the difficulties most people having with finding jobs. Other than that, this collection could not come more highly reccommended.

-Shane Fallon, New York, NY

This book would have been a pleasure to read - the content is interesting and well written, but the edition is unbelievably bad...a paragraph from somewhere else in the book is printed halfway down the page, totally unrelated to anything else, then the copy picks up from somewhere other than where it left off; a poem stops at the bottom of the page only to start up 3 pages later with material in between that begins out of nowhere. Pages are left out causing a huge gap in the sequence of events. These errors happen over and over again throughout the book, making reading an entirely frustrating experience.