Global Perspectives Book Club "Cry, the Beloved Country"

Global Perspectives is a group devoted to exploring history and looking at diverse perspectives through fiction.  The program is held monthly on the 2nd Wednesday of the month from August-November 2025 at 6pm in the Carnegie Library meeting room. We alternate between discussing a book one month to viewing a movie the next month throughout the series. Be sure to email arobertson@munpl.org if you would like to join our email list.

This Month's Book:

This month, we will read Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, a novel set in South America during the 20th century.

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Cry, the Beloved Country, the most famous and important novel in South Africa’s history, was an immediate worldwide bestseller in 1948. Alan Paton’s impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is a work of searing beauty.

Cry, the Beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, “We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country the statesman, the poet and the novelist meet in a unique harmony.”

Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.