The Preacher Had Ten Kids

by Frances Bradsher

Book Overview

Love, courage, humor, and faith never go ut of style. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0842348867
• ISBN13: 9780842348867
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

People will always be people, in any time and place.

"Love, courage, humor, and faith never go out of style." So says the back cover of this book's dust jacket, and they're true words. This memoir, published in 1980, reads delightfully in 2006. Willard Frances Cherry was the tenth and last child born to a Methodist minister and his wife, in 1899. That happens to be the year my own maternal grandmother was born. The rural and small town United States in which "Willard" (so help me, her parents insisted on calling the poor kid that!) grew up will sound familiar, I think, to any American reader who's been lucky enough to hear an aging relative's childhood stories. It's in some ways a more nurturing time, with stronger family units and a powerful sense of community; but in other ways it's a more dangerous time, when typhoid can sweep through a boarding school's dormitory and a lynch mob can haunt the night-time streets of a little Southern town. What impresses me most about this book is how clearly Bradsher reinforces a simple truth: that people will always be people, in any time and place. She paints an unsentimental yet innately sympathetic portrait of human nature as it operates in her family, and in each community where they live during her girlhood and coming-of-age years.