No writes like Ms. Walker. I fooled by the title but blown away by the story.
Loved it!

The delight of reading an author who is as good at writing nonfiction as she is at fiction. Highly recommended to anyone of pale complexion who desires to understand better the experience of growing and living the revolution up black in America.

This book would have been a pleasure to read - the content is interesting and well written, but the edition is unbelievably bad...a paragraph from somewhere else in the book is printed halfway down the page, totally unrelated to anything else, then the copy picks up from somewhere other than where it left off; a poem stops at the bottom of the page only to start up 3 pages later with material in between that begins out of nowhere. Pages are left out causing a huge gap in the sequence of events. These errors happen over and over again throughout the book, making reading an entirely frustrating experience.

Many of the pages were not properly printed. Entire paragraphs are missing, lines cut off, pages are duplicated. I need to buy a new copy so I can have the complete version of this great book.

This is excellent book. It gives insight into Alice Walker's thinking process as she wrote her incredible works.

Enlightening

Alice Walker writes ideas I don't already know, and she gives me new ways of interpreting people. She is worth considering, especially when you think you disagree with her. It is better to engage her in thoughtful debate than to not listen to what she has to say. Ms. Walker did not title this book "Anything I Love Can Be Saved." Importantly, she chose "Anything WE Love Can Be Saved." The book discusses pursuits she has shared with others.

"Now I know that . . .activism is often my muse . . . All we own, at least for the short time we have it, is our life . . . Whenever I experience evil, and it is not, unfortunately, uncommon to experience it in these times, my deepest feeling is disappointment. I have learned to accept the fact that we risk disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, every time we act. Every time we decide to believe the world can be better. Every time we decide to trust others to be as noble as we think they are. And that there might be years during which our grief is equal to, or even greater than, our hope. The alternative, however, not to act, and therefore to miss experiencing other people at their best, reaching toward their fullness, has never appealed to me." pp. xxiv-xxv.

I've spent a good deal of time researching concepts of love. Many people are familiar with Paul's description of love's attributes from 1 Corinthians 13. Alice Walker highlights the next chapter's oppression of women in the verses of 1 Corinthians 14:33-35. "For God is not a God of disorder but of peace. As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church." I have to agree with Ms. Walker's assertion that the Bible was written by men. And I doubt any intelligent "god" would seek any "peace" that silences women or dictates they become intellectual subordinates to their husbands. As I have grown older, I've found more community and guidance from the voices of women.

"If the women of the world were comfortable, this would be a comfortable world."

To understand what the title of this book might be saying, a person must interpret how Alice Walker is using the word "saved." "Saved" is a word I have trouble with because I grew up in a religious community where a person could only be "saved" by choosing one being and one way. Seeking additional voices or additional community was "fallen" or "depraved." Alice Walker does not appear to be primarily be using the word "saved" in the commonly connotated evangelical "conversion to more enlightened path" sense. She is also not primarily using the word "saved" to promote "possession or acquisition of" another human being.

Ms. Walker emphasizes "saved" in the sense that any person, idea, or object of good character can be remembered, preserved, nourished, grown, and sheltered by love. She says "love and justice and truth are the only monuments that generate everwidening circles of energy and life . . . though trashed and trampled, generation after generation."

She discusses principles of preserving and sharing past loves in relation to recounting how written word efforts and community acknowledgement have honored Zora Neale Hurston, a woman who herself wrote in order to honor and preserve the often concealed, but discretely passed down, African American culture that survived hundreds of years of slavery and discriminatory religious & cultural practices.

Zora also wrote to preserve the memory of specific loves from her personal history. In Zora's work, Alice found a character named Shug, Alice's "outside" grandmother, her grandfather's lover, whose descendant Alice was named after. And if you've read or watched The Color Purple, you are familiar with Shug. There are real people behind most great literary characters.

Alice believes in preserving and sharing the good qualities of those who were unjustly dishonored and have passed from view. Her essay "Anything We Love Can Be Saved" was an address she gave at the the First Annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival in 1990, a festival bringing attention to and honoring the writings of Zora Neal Hurston. Injustice is not overcome through silence. As the subtitle of this book "A Writer's Activism" emphasizes, love is active, notorious, and publicized. The act of love may start "First in their own hearts," but it must be communicated to and shared with "the hearts of others. They have only to make their love inseparable from their belief. And both inseparable from hard work . . . Paying homage to her, memorializing her light, her struggle . . . brought us peace."

I am a lonely and sad person regularly. I would not describe myself as depressed, because depression too often has a meaning that the person is down due to misunderstanding. My sadness is borne out of knowing that worthwhile ideas, methods, and interactions exist, and knowing I am no longer able to participate with them. (Which ironically is an underestimated and underdiagnosed cause of real, clinical depression.)

When I get too sad, I pick up a book like this one by an author who has an insightful & challenging voice. When I feel an absence of someone challenging me with new & good ideas, I pretend that instead of just reading Ms. Walker's books - I pretend she is in the room with me discussing her radical ideas and intent on keeping me company with her arousing ideals. I imagine she appreciates attentive feedback, and a willingness to thoroughly consider all her ideas, even when she is angry.

And when I pause between ideas, I dream of a world that doesn't exist. I dream that most people would choose to act in ways similar to Ms. Walker. I allow myself to fantasize that most parents might choose to be less hypocritical and would agree to say for the sake of their daughters, "all I can promise her is not to lie" even if it "is painful to her, I believe nonetheless it is better than a lie. Surely better than the lies I was told - 'for my own good' - only to sniff them out eventually and become entangled in them."

Then I get a peaceful, easy feeling and like a mad one, I choose to live as if "love is best expressed through truth," "Because to me, it is precisely our personal memories of joy and delight in each other and our present passions and loves that sustain us." p. 66

And like Ms. Walker, I stubbornly refuse to forget or to pretend those memories never occured. It is a lonely refusal. It may be an unwise refusal. But it is a less unhealthy refusal for me than hypocrisy. It is not a raging refusal (as Ms. Walker indicates it is in her at times). And it is not a depressed refusal. It is a clear, conscious, chosen & sad refusal. And in that existence, I thank Ms. Walker for her ideas, her stubborn voice, her words against likely failures, and in my imaginary world - her companionship.