A Lesson Before Dying
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- ISBN13: 9780375702709
- Condition: New
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Product Description
From the leader of A Gathering of Ancient Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Together they come to know the heroism of resisting.Amazon.com Review
Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 1997: In a tiny 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 terrible; though the young man on examination 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 examination, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be…” So starts 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 tiny 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 delight in, 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 vital lesson as well: heroism is not permanently 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.
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Ugh. I had to read this bok for school and it sucks. Preformatted, horrible, and dull. Dave is so incorrect with his review. The only lesson that I learned is that the book sucks.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I have read tons of books just like this one. This is just another book written by an mad African American leader, who still feels the “pain” from being persecuted because of his race. In fact the leader wrote it because he establish that there weren’t many books written by African Americans in the public library. The book has a few excellent points, but it is constructed around the whole racism issue. I know racism is a huge issue, but what’s done is done. OK we get it, African Americans were treted very terribly. I guess the leader didn’t have some additional original thought.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I had to read this book for school, and, first let me say I’m not just some highs chooler who despises to read, my favorite writers are Kafka, Faulkner and Dostoevsky, but this book was all but utter trash. It had a few meaningful moments, but generally it was devoid of characterization, emotion, and plot. I give it two stars for trying, but it just tries too hard to be fantastic. Gaines-Accept average.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Gaines took what could have been an appealing thought, and sculpted it into one of the cheesiest, most dull novels ever written. Yes, blacks in the South in the 1940s had it tough … there is no need to remind us. Gaines did nothing to expand upon our knowledge of this, and if his intention was for greater equality, he failed miserably and only made more despise between the characters and/or the people who read this book. Gaines makes an unlikable, selfish protagonist, Grant, and then drags us through the hardships in his relationships with his aunt, girlfriend (whose relationship with Grant certainly brings out the worst in Gaines’ writing abilities), and his death-row inmate charity case Jefferson. Jefferson’s diary is perhaps the only effective part of the book in provoking emotion. The only cut to be learned from this horrible novel is never eeeeeeeever listen to Oprah again! I highly recommend this book for persons who are as bored as a board and for persons who have no life. Have a nice, wonderful day =)
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
A Lesson Before Dying is a book about an African American man, Jefferson, who is sentenced to life in prison for killing another man, and the jury tells him he is just a hog. The whole tale line is about a teacher named Grant who is assigned to make Jefferson realize he is not a hog. I establish the book to be very unentertaining and unexciting; consequently, I felt the book was a waste of time to read. I felt that it was childish for a grown man to reflect he is a hog because the jury that sentenced him told him this. If he was a man he would know that and he would not need Grant to convince him of this. After killing another man he deserves to be sentenced to life in prison and he also deserves to be killed himself. The book talked about racism to a certain degree. Gaines said that all the events that were going on were in the works because the jury was all white people where Jefferson was a black man. I feel this is fake because any human who kills another human does not deserve to live. Also any man who can have his frame of mind changed by one jury telling him something is not a man. This book is stupid and it was a waste of to read it. I would not recommend this book to anyone that I know.
At the end of the book Jefferson writes a journal which is one of the last chapters. The journal is written lacking any form of punctuation and does not have any capitol letters. The chapter is nearly impossible to read and very hard to know because nothing is spelled or punctuated correctly. I feel that Gaines probably did this to add the effect of an uneducated man writing the journal; but, it made the book ever harder to read because it needed to be read very slowly to be understood, causing the book to be extremely dull.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5