Beloved by Toni Morrison

This book was written in 1987 by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison. From the back cover: Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved."

Wow. This book is incredible. It is like watching a great artist flesh out a breathtaking and horrible painting up close. There is the idea of what the painting will be and slowly each color is added and built-up so that when it is finished and we back up, the effect is truly stunning. Like a Monet, up close we can see the detail, each blob of color and brush-stroke but when we step back - what a masterpiece!

This book's details are grisly, hard, bitter, beautiful, heartwrenching, poetic and devestating. It is a true look at slavery in the United States. It is always horrifying to me how awful human beings can be to one another. Slavery, the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the treatment of the American Indians - history is fraught with evidence of the nastiness of men. But also the strength of the human spirit, the beauty in life and how amazing people can be. This book was terribly hard to read and impossible to put down.

It certainly puts my life in perspective, while I am worrying about the economy and the bailout and whether California will ever have a budget , those worries are nothing! I am not worried about whether I will be fed, or beaten, or tied and bridled like a horse, or have my children sold away from me, or my husband shot or hanged or burned. I don't have to care for someone who thinks of me as an animal, less than livestock, locked in a cage. I have a say in who will father my children. I am and always have been truly free. My worries are nothing.