China Galland
Reviews
"This is the riveting story of a remarkable effort to resurrect the dead. And it couldn't have come at a more crucial time. What Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz called our 'refusal to remember' threatens, in the midst of a fantastic proliferation of mass media, to sever our links to the past and leave us a nation of amnesiacs sliding into the memory hole. Here is an antidote: The search by a handful of dedicated people, inspired by one woman's persistence, to uncover a long-neglected burial ground and give the anonymous folk interred there the voice denied them as slaves. Read on; I guarantee that once you start, you will not stop, and when you are done, you will have discovered the healing power of Love Cemetery."
- Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal
"Love Cemetery is a white woman's odyssey into the shrouded past of racist America, a covert history that has been become as overgrown as the burial ground in the title. The author's journey back to her family's ancestral home of East Texas reconstructs the constancy of oppression and hate, a legacy of unexpressed sorrow firmly rooted in our national psyche. In this nearly forgotten African-American cemetery called Love lie centuries of grief. May you weep, as did I, for what Galland discovers in these piney woods, and through this offering know your country and self in humbling new ways.
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To create a page-turner about our collective shadow is the sweetest gift a writer can offer. "
- Paul Hawken, Author of Blessed Unrest
"Racial injustice continues to be a wound in American life that calls out for particular and concrete narratives of healing. This book is just such a narrative, but an especially evocative one. Galland captures the struggle to reclaim one small cemetery in Texas with such engrossing drama and personal detail that the story becomes something larger still--a universal struggle to reclaim the ground of Deep Compassion that lies untended in the human heart. Love Cemetery is a moving work of immense social consciousness and spiritual power written by a very gifted writer."
- Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees
"Love Cemetery is a white woman's odyssey into the shrouded past of racist America, a covert history that has been become as overgrown as the burial ground in the title. The author's journey back to her family's ancestral home of East Texas reconstructs the constancy of oppression and hate, a legacy of unexpressed sorrow firmly rooted in our national psyche. In this nearly forgotten African-American cemetery called Love lie centuries of grief. May you weep, as did I, for what Galland discovers in these piney woods, and through this offering know your country and self in humbling new ways.
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To create a page-turner about our collective shadow is the sweetest gift a writer can offer. "
- Paul Hawken, Author of Blessed Unrest