Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, a kind of last testament to his remarkable forebears. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father - an ardent pacifist - and his grandfather who came west to Kansas to fight for abolition and 'preached men into the Civil War'. And he tells the 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 friends wayward son. This is also the tale of a remarkable vision of life as a wonderously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life and how history lives through generations.
The New York Times - James Wood
Gilead is a beautiful work -- demanding, grave and lucid -- and is, if anything, more out of time than Robinson's book of essays, suffused as it is with a Protestant bareness that sometimes recalls George Herbert (who is alluded to several times, along with John Donne) and sometimes the American religious spirit that produced Congregationalism and 19th-century Transcendentalism and those bareback religious riders Emerson, Thoreau and Melville.