Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Summary and Reviews of The Poet of Tolstoy Park by Sonny Brewer

The Poet of Tolstoy Park by Sonny Brewer

The Poet of Tolstoy Park

by Sonny Brewer
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • First Published:
  • Mar 1, 2005, 272 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Mar 2006, 288 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

A moving and irresistible book based on the true story of Henry Stuart who, given less than a year to live, moved to Alabama, discarded his boots and built a round hut that he lived in for the next twenty years.

"The more you transform your life from the material to the spiritual domain, the less you become afraid of death." Leo Tolstoy spoke these words, and they became Henry Stuart's raison d'etre. The Poet of Tolstoy Park is the unforgettable novel based on the true story of Henry Stuart's life, which was reclaimed from his doctor's belief that he would not live another year.

Henry responds to the news by slogging home barefoot in the rain. It's 1925. The place: Canyon County, Idaho. Henry is sixty-seven, a retired professor and a widower who has been told a warmer climate would make the end more tolerable. San Diego would be a good choice.

Instead, Henry chose Fairhope, Alabama, a town with utopian ideals and a haven for strong-minded individualists. Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, and Clarence Darrow were among its inhabitants. Henry bought his own ten acres of piney woods outside Fairhope. Before dying, underscored by the writings of his beloved Tolstoy, Henry could begin to "perfect the soul awarded him" and rest in the faith that he, and all people, would succeed, "even if it took eons." Human existence, Henry believed, continues in a perfect circle unmarred by flaws of personality, irrespective of blood and possessions and rank, and separate from organized religion. In Alabama, until his final breath, he would chase these high ideas.

But first, Henry had to answer up for leaving Idaho. Henry's dearest friend and intellectual sparring partner, Pastor Will Webb, and Henry's two adult sons, Thomas and Harvey, were baffled and angry that he would abandon them and move to the Deep South, living in a barn there while he built a round house of handmade concrete blocks. His new neighbors were perplexed by his eccentric behavior as well. On the coldest day of winter he was barefoot, a philosopher and poet with ideas and words to share with anyone who would listen. And, mysteriously, his "last few months" became years. He had gone looking for a place to learn lessons in dying, and, studiously advanced to claim a vigorous new life.

The Poet of Tolstoy Park is a moving and irresistible story, a guidebook of the mind and spirit that lays hold of the heart. Henry Stuart points the way through life's puzzles for all of us, becoming in this timeless tale a character of such dimension that he seems more alive now than ever.

Excerpt
The Poet of Tolstoy Park

After the heyoka ceremony I came to live here where I am now between Wounded Knee Creek and Grass Creek. Others came too and we made these little gray houses of logs that you see, and they are square. It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square.

"You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle. And that is because the Power of the World always works in a circle, and everything tries to be round…

"The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball. And so are all the stars. The wind in its greatest power whirls.

"Birds make their nests in a circle, for theirs is the same religion as ours.

"But the Waischus [white men] have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying, for the Power is not in us any more."

Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux



Chapter One

Henry walked out of the doctor's office and the drumming rain that had begun to fall went ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
    This is a fictionalized account of a true story. How accurate do you think Brewer’s portrayal of Henry Stuart might be, and does this affect your enjoyment of the book?

  1. What qualities do you most admire in Henry, and what do you think we can learn from his story?

  2. What do you think cured Henry?

  3. After outliving his diagnosis, why do you think Henry chose not to return to his sons in Idaho?

  4. Does Henry Stuart remind you of anyone you know? Do you think a story like his could take place today?

  5. Brother O’Neil says: “Books and writing are agents for the accumulation of ideas and your minds are overfull.” What do you think of this statement, and what do you think of Henry’s strategy to quiet his ...
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

This is a gentle, thoughtful tale, told simply and well, but not one to choose if you're looking for pulse-pounding action!..continued

Full Review (135 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).

Media Reviews

Kirkus Reviews
More pleasures here from the novel's moral clarity than from those traditional sources, plot and character.

Library Journal - Beth E. Andersen
Starred review. Brewer offers a gloriously imagined vision of one resourceful life. It will not escape those who fall in love with this beautiful novel that Stuart's cement beehive stands today in its original location, which is now a parking lot. A powerful prayer to a less complicated way of being in the world, this book is highly recommended.

Publishers Weekly
A dying man's decision to move from Idaho to Alabama becomes a quixotic spiritual journey in Brewer's ruminative, idiosyncratic first novel, based on a true story.

Author Blurb Bev Marshall, author of Walking Through Shadows and Right as Rain
An intoxicating and loving tribute to an extraordinary man, Henry James Stuart, whose life story is one of the most fascinating adventures I have ever read. . . . Written in language both lush and luminous, Sonny Brewer's debut novel is sustenance for both the mind and the soul. I believe that this novel is destined to become a literary treasure, and Brewer is destined to become a major voice in American literature.

Author Blurb Pat Conroy, author of My Losing Season
The Poet of Tolstoy Park is one of those unique and wonderful books that sings a hymn of praise to the philosophical and spiritual part of daily life.

Author Blurb Rick Bragg - Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All Over but the Shoutin'
Sonny Brewer writes the way people think and talk, if, of course, those people are poets. . . . Here, you smell the salt of the bay and the blood of the fish and the wet in the skinny pines. . . . This book wraps its arms around you, rubs its face against yours with a stubbled cheek, and refuses to let you go.

Author Blurb Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and This Rock
A celebration of essential simplicity and the dignity of work. Sonny Brewer has given us a story of exploration and discovery, of the wisdom of plainness, of living in touch with each approaching and passing moment. You will not want to put it down.

Author Blurb William Gay, author of Provinces of Night
With prose that mirrors the grace of his protagonist, Brewer seamlessly merges time and place with the interior landscape of the heart.

Author Blurb Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump
Without literary pretense and in good back porch storytelling fashion, Sonny Brewer stands his characters up and turns them around so you know them front and back.

Reader Reviews

Kathy Guidroz

More than wonderful
My life has been a spiritual journey thus far so when I met Sonny Brewer in the parking lot of my office, I had no idea his book and meeting him would be added unto my life in such a precious manner. This book is based on real life. Truth. Sonny ...   Read More
Walter H. Klaus

A-hole as compared to an Eccentric
The difference between an eccentric and an a-hole is education. Think about how Stuart treated his friend and those who wanted to befriend him, pretty bad, but since he was a former professor they attributed his personality to that of an eccentric.

Write your own review!

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



If you live in or around Fairhope, Alabama ('a dozen miles as the laughing gull would fly across the bay from the port city of Mobile') you might be lucky enough to know Sonny Brewer, the owner of the Over The Transom Bookstore in Fairhope.  

The Poet of Tolstoy Park is his first novel,  A Sound Like Thunder will be published in August and he's currently working on the third volume of his Fairhope Trilogy: The Tumble Inn and Sit Down Café.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked The Poet of Tolstoy Park, try these:

  • The Quickening Maze jacket

    The Quickening Maze

    by Adam Foulds

    Published 2010

    About this book

    More by this author

    In 1837 the great poet John Clare finds himself in High Beach - a mental institution on the outskirts of London. Soon another famed writer, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and grows entwined in the cloistered world of High Beach and its residents. (Paperback Original)

  • The Possessed jacket

    The Possessed

    by Elif Batuman

    Published 2010

    About this book

    More by this author

    The true but unlikely stories of lives devoted — Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully! — to the Russian classics.

We have 7 read-alikes for The Poet of Tolstoy Park, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    by Lynda Cohen Loigman
    Lynda Cohen Loigman's delightful novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern opens in 1987. The titular ...
  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people... but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now