The Gospel of Trees: A Memoir

The Gospel of Trees: A Memoir

In this compelling, beautiful memoir, award-winning writer Apricot Irving recounts her childhood as a missionaryâ€™s daughter in Haiti during a time of upheavalâ€”both in the country and in her home.

Apricot Irving grew up as a missionaryâ€™s daughter in Haitiâ€”a country easy to sensationalize but difficult to understand. Her father was an agronomist, a man who hiked alone into the hills with a macouti of seeds to preach the gospel of trees in a deforested but resilient country. Her mother and sisters, meanwhile, spent most of their days in the confines of the hospital compound they called home. As a child, this felt like paradise to Irving; as a teenager, the same setting felt like a prison. Outside of the walls of the missionary enclave, Haiti was a tumult of bugle-call bus horns and bicycles that jangled over hard-packed dirt, the clamor of chickens and cicadas, the sudden, insistent clatter of rain as it hammered across tin roofs and the swell of voices running ahead of the storm.

As she emerges into womanhood, an already confusing process made all the more complicated by Christianityâ€™s demands, Irving struggles to understand her fatherâ€™s choices. His unswerving commitment to his mission, and the anger and despair that followed failed enterprises, threatened to splinter his family.

Beautiful, poignant, and explosive, The Gospel of Trees is the story of a family crushed by ideals, and restored to kindness by honesty. Told against the backdrop of Haitiâ€™s long history of interventionâ€”often unwelcomeâ€”it grapples with the complicated legacy of those who wish to improve the world. Drawing from family letters, cassette tapes, journals, and interviews, it is an exploration of missionary culpability and idealism, told from within.
Country USA
Brand Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer Simon & Schuster
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 9781451690453
ReleaseDate 2018-03-06
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781451690453

Country	USA
Brand	Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer	Simon & Schuster
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	9781451690453
ReleaseDate	2018-03-06
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781451690453

The Gospel of Trees: A Memoir

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