I'm from England
buy procyclidine A few days before James McBride won the National Book Award for fiction, I met him at a reading and told him that he should win because his "The Good Lord Bird" offered an alternative to a celebrated film about slavery that sinks into ideological mud. The film was mercilessly sincere, but the enslaved men and women in it appeared to be there only for the white characters to exorcise their inner monstrosities. Mr. McBride respects slaves' humanity, filling his novel with lore, hazard, cruelty, romance and humor. His love of the black Southern voice pushes him in Ralph Ellison's direction, which resonates free of sociology and condescending sympathy. Mr. McBride refuses to put 19th-century Negro characters in a place devoid of human unpredictability, what one of Duke Ellington's nephews called "the compound." All of his people, black or white, male or female, abolitionists or slavers, play by no premeditated rules. In a time as contrived and phony as ours, "The Good Lord Bird" seems a miracle, much more major than minor, a long drink of the blues, so real it speaks to all listeners.