literature

You are listening to the High Plains Public Radio Reader’s Book Club. My name is Freddy Gipp, I am an enrolled member of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, and my Indian name is T’san T’hoop Ah’n, meaning “Lead Horse”, in the Kiowa language, I graduated from the University of Kansas and head a small community development firm based in Lawrence, KS.

In her book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman tells the story of Lia Lee, a young Hmong girl whose epilepsy was diagnosed in Merced, California.

This is Phillip Periman in Amarillo giving listeners a taste of what we are reading in the HPPR readers’ book club this spring. Anne Fadiman’s non-fiction narrative story of the cross-cultural conflict between a Hmong family whose baby girl has a seizure disorder and modern western medicine came out in 1997. Her title came from the Hmong name for the illness qaug dab peg(kow da pays) which translates: “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”.

This is Nicole English coming to you from the Sociology Department at Fort Hays State University for HPPR's Book-Bytes....

This is a discussion of the book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down:  A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. 

This is Leslie VonHolten with another HPPR Radio Readers Book Byte.

A lifetime of reading books teaches you that words—English words, anyway—are expandable, malleable vessels of seemingly endless meaning. As I read Anne Fadiman’s incredible book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, I kept chewing on one word in particular: Culture. Such a small word, culture. Interesting how in the United States, we load that small word up with so much  complexity and contradictory simplicity—with such respect and dismissal.

Hi, I am Phillip Periman from Amarillo, one of the discussants for the High Plains Radio Readers’ Book Club. One of the three books we are reading this Spring is “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” written by Anne Fadiman and published in 1997. This non-fiction book is about a Hmong refugee family, the Lees and their daughter Lia stricken with epilepsy, and the major family trauma and loss they suffer because of  cross cultural differences with the American medical system.

 Hello, Radio Readers. I’m Jane Holwerda from Dodge City, Kansas.  Our Spring Read, Cultures in a Common Land, invites us to think about conflicts between our ways of life and the customs, habits, and traditions of others.  We began our spring read with Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, a novel that plunks a 1950’s family from the American South into the middle of the African Congo.  Not versed in the customs or the geography of the land, and slow to learn, each member of the Price family adapts or dies.

This is Mike Strong, in Hays, for HPPR’s Radio Reader’s Book Club. The book is “Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver.

The jobs of spies are justified by the stories they tell, even when the stories lie. They work best when your “customer” wants to hear them.” The oldest two-punch sales routine goes:
     1 – You have a problem.
     2 – We have the solution.

Hi, I’m Marcy McKay from Amarillo, author of Amazon’s #1 Hot New Release, When Life Feels Like a House Fire: Transforming Your Stress. I’m excited to be a Radio Reader for High Plains Public Radio’s Book Club. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver tells about Nathan Price, a 1950’s preacher who drags his wife and four daughters from Georgia to save the wicked souls in the Congolese jungle of Africa. It’s a powerful novel about politics, religion, sin, redemption and everything else that makes for great storytelling.

You are listening to the High Plains Public Radio Reader’s Book Club…. My name is Freddy Gipp, I am an enrolled member of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, and my Indian name is T’san T’hoop Ah’n, meaning “Lead Horse”, in the Kiowa language, I graduated from the University of Kansas and head a small community development firm based in Lawrence, KS.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, we dive into a mixture of greed, ignorance and the conflation of religion, history and plight.

My name is Jessica Sadler and I am a Science Teacher and STEAM facilitator in Olathe, Kansas. I am here with the other book leaders to discuss The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. This story follows a family of Baptist missionaries from Georgia to the Congo.

There are many exceptional themes that can be found within this novel. Of them all, I resonated most with the theme of Saviorism and entitlement, both of which hold serious consequences.

Hi, I’m Marcy McKay from Amarillo, author of Amazon’s #1 Hot New Release, When Life Feels Like a House Fire: Transforming Your Stress. I’m excited to be a Radio Reader for High Plains Public Radio’s Book Club.

In The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, Nathan Price is a preacher in the 1950’s who drags his wife and four daughters from their Georgia home to save the wicked souls in the Congolese jungle of Africa.

Hi, I’m Valerie a radio reader from Topeka and I just finished Genesis which is part I of the Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. The book is part of HPPR’s radio readers book club this go round with the theme cultures in common.

First, a confession: I love Kingsolver. The Prodigal Summer is one of my favorite books. BUT this is my second try reading the Poisonwood Bible and I am NOT a fan. The book is about a missionary family of Baptists that go to the Congo for a year. It’s set in the 1950s and told from the point of view of the 4 daughters and the mother.

Hi, I’m Phillip Periman from Amarillo, Texas. I will be one of the discussants for the Radio Readers Book Club this spring.  The first book we read, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, published in 1998, has a story that resonates today. In the novel, the Reverend Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist missionary from Georgia, takes his wife Oleanna and his four daughters Rachel, the twins Adah and Leah and their baby Ruth May to a remote area of the Congo.  It is 1959 -60 and the Congo is struggling to rid itself of Belgian rule.

Hi, I’m Marcy McKay from Amarillo, author of Amazon’s #1 Hot New Release, When Life Feels Like a House Fire: Transforming Your Stress. I’m excited to be a Radio Reader for High Plains Public Radio’s Book Club. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver tells about Nathan Price, a 1950’s preacher who drags his wife and four daughters from Georgia to save the wicked souls in the Congolese jungle of Africa. It’s a powerful novel about politics, religion, sin, redemption and everything that makes for a great story.

The first time I read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, 20 years ago when it was first out, it was a new bestseller, and I was a new mother. Of all the characters, I most related to, and was most perplexed by Orleanna Price, the mother. Though my circumstances were not nearly so extreme, I too felt lost in this new land of motherhood, this small baby wholly dependent on me. Those first few months of parenting are such a shock. Fortunately, my journey into motherhood was not nearly as dramatic, or isolating, as the Congo was for Orleanna.

Hi, I’m Marcy McKay from Amarillo, author of Amazon’s #1 Hot New Release, When Life Feels Like a House Fire: Transforming Your Stress. I’m excited to be a Radio Reader for High Plains Public Radio’s Book Club. It was fun to revisit The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, an epic novel that spans three decades. The story begins in 1959 when Pastor Nathan Price drags his wife and four daughters from their Georgia home to save the wicked souls in the Congolese jungle of Africa. There are politics, religion, sin, redemption, family feuds, secrets and more.

Hey, you all! It’s 2021—finally!! And HPPR’s Radio Readers is back with a spring read for all of us!  What with all the lessons offered by 2020 (may it rest in peace), we’ve opted for a series of books to help us explore Cultures in a Common Land, as a way to talk about how to live alongside others whose beliefs and ways of being seem not to align with our own.  Know what I mean?