In Dancing with God, Steve Wall describes several remarkable Southerners who survived near-death traumas or had other experiences with the Lord. In each chapter, the author introduces a person, then presents that person's story in his or her own words. Wall has captured some inspiring and downright odd Southern voices in this book. Floyd Justice, a soft-spoken fisherman, describes how it felt to spend two and a half hours underwater and survive with God's help. When Sarah Phillips of Hampton, Virginia, tells her near-death story, she pauses many times to say a few words to Pretty Bird, the cockatiel who always perches on her head. Most of the people in this book are rural, extremely generous, and reluctant to talk about their strange experiences. This reader found Germaine Curley's vision of God particularly intriguing: "He has no face and He has no body. He's just two giant-sized puffy beautiful arms."
Wall writes that he hopes to grow closer to God by interviewing people who have encountered the deity firsthand. During his journey toward God, Wall considers various ways people express their Christianity. In one chapter, the author poses as a homeless man and visits a soup kitchen, where the church-affiliated workers treat him badly, but a destitute man gives him survival tips and offers him a place to live. Wall's photographs of the characters he met while making the book help bring their words to life. This book will appeal to religious readers and to fans of Wall's previous books on Native American spirituality. --Jill Marquis
From Publishers Weekly
Wall, a journalist and photographer whose work has appeared in a variety of publications, writes this combination road trip and spiritual allegory (which includes 40 of his b&w photographs) in a journalistic style suitable for a popular audience. The narrative skates along the edges of main thoroughfares that lead from the deep South to New Mexico, then back to Tennessee as Wall sets out to find people who've encountered God. In a series of 11 vignettes, he almost always finds them where he is not looking, and they lead him not so much to God as to a new encounter with himself. In the first vignette, Wall goes "undercover" to an Atlanta mission where one of the "regulars" takes him under his wing. Surprised by this encounter, he goes on the road, where he meets ordinary people whose encounters with God have often come in near-death experiences. He speaks with a hitchhiker in Texas, a journalist who has moved to New Mexico and ventured into herbal medicine, a New Mexico artist who tells him to "pay attention." Paying attention leads Wall back to his alma mater, Tennessee Temple University, a Fundamentalist college to which he had promised himself he would never return. The result is an encounter with himself that is also an encounter with fundamentalism. Wall's book should prove a timely provocation for a significant audience that doesn't much get off the Interstate.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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