In the Shadow of the Sacred Grove

By honestly describing her difficult and gradual acceptance into the daily life of a West African rural community — a world of herders, potters, subsistence farmers, diviners and initiates — Carol Spindel renders a foreign culture with exceptional immediacy and emotional depth. She is especially drawn to the world of women, and her portraits of that world's beauty and hardship are extraordinary for their precision, warmth, and dramatic power. A New York Times Notable Book.

This engaging account of a young American's cross-cultural experience in northern Ivory Coast has been taught in many African Studies and Global Studies classes and is on reading lists for study abroad and service abroad programs. This is the original 1989 Vintage Departures text, now out of print, with a redesigned cover.

“Carol Spindel's intriguing account of life in an Ivory Coast village is direct and fresh. And her attention is tellingly focused on what too often fails to appear in narratives of rural Africa — the lives and works and fates of women. This is humane, sensitive, and informative writing.”

— Barry Lopez

“Her intriguing memoir wittily and astutely records both her own adjustment to the village and her perceptions of its way of life.”

— Publishers' Weekly

Ms. Spindel is an experienced artist and her temperament shines through in her writing — clear, bright, full of splashes of color, skillfully composed. But she is also a sharp observer and a skillful listener…and her book has much to teach us."

— New York Times Book Review

“In the Shadow of the Sacred Grove blossoms with a ready wit and an effortless conjuring of sound, smell, image, and the unique rhythms of the personalities…Spindel's language and observations are consistently sharp and memorable.”

— San Francisco Chronicle

“Carol Spindel learns how not to be a stranger among other women; how not to be merely a 'white woman from another place,' how not to be a 'foreigner,' left on the fringes of another people's life. She poses, and answers, questions about the lives of a proud and shy people that have long preoccupied those of us to whom Africa represents the universal continent of birth. Her integrity is warming, her fidelity to her own experience and faith in her own womanity very moving indeed.”

— Alice Walker

“…as smooth and as centered as the water jars the women help each other lift to their head.”

— Women's Review of Books

“Anyone interested in Africa would do well to read Spindel's book….(It) promises to make you laugh, cry, and yearn for more.”

— African Arts