A Gathering of Old Men
By Ernest J. Gaines
- Release Date: 1983-09-12
- Genre: Black Literature
Description
A powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man--set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s.
The Village Voice called A Gathering of Old Men “the best-written novel on Southern race relations in over a decade.”
Reviews
It’s fine
4By asvpwill19It’s okay but the page numbers on here don’t correlate with the book I’m kinda confusedI may not be the best judge here but...
3By BingokI was assigned this book for class work (I bought it on my own accord but that is beside the point) so I really didn't know what to expect. After reading it, I can't really say that I have walked away with much of anything more than I started with. The book feels like it could have been 1/5 the length, seeing as how the entire story consists of only 3 different events: the gathering of people, the fight, and the trial. Of those three, the gathering and discussion take up 95% of the book. I also couldn't keep half of the characters straight, many of them not even being worth remembering since they star in a grand total of 3 pages or less. There was way too much piled on and it just left me confused. There are a lot of questions I have about this book and many of them are simply about the writing style, not the content. All that said, the story was interesting enough, but I don't think I would ever recommend this to anyone unless they were researching Black/White history.