A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER- OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK - WINNER OF
THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION - NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE
AWARD WINNER- A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - MORE THAN 1 MILLION
COPIES SOLD
"Quietly powerful [and] moving." O, The Oprah Magazine (recommended
reading)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award,
GILEAD is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence
that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon
part.
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter
to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the
son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young
man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to
Kansas to fight for abolition: He preached men into the Civil War, then,
at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye
in battle.
Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an
ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts,
concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the
abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the
union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between
fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained
relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's
wayward son.
This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal
vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation.
It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life,
and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when
betrayed and forgotten.
