A Lesson Before Dying

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines [Revised, spoilers hidden 9/12/23] I think this book deserves to be considered a classic of American literature about Black-white relations in the American South. Two other books I think of in this category (there are several others) are To Kill a Mockingbird......more

How did I feel at the end of this book....uplifted and beaten down, both. All the love and all the hate and all the even more stultifying indifference. All the indignity and indignation. So many very heavy feelings spread through this sad story, but there are moments of redemption if you watch caref......more

This account of a school teacher's attempt to bring dignity to the last days of a condemned man in 1940's Louisiana is moving but still somehow disappointing. Shortened, it would have made a fine novella.......more

A look back at Jim Crow-era Louisiana. Rosa Parks has yet take her rightful seat during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and it is still another twenty years until the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march. But Jackie Robinson has recently become first baseman of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In a Louisiana pa......more

This review does not really reveal anything about the plot that you don’t see in the blurb for the book. The novel takes place in the late 1940s on a plantation/township similar to the place where the author was born in southern Louisiana in 1933. As a child Gaines would have been very familiar with......more