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Book reviews for "Black,_Elizabeth" sorted by average review score:

Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture
Published in Hardcover by University of Minnesota Press (2000)
Authors: Elizabeth Chin and Elizabeth Chin
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A Review of Elizabeth Chin's Purchasing Power
When faced with the concept of "Black Kids and American Consumer Culture," I immediately turn my thoughts to the image of African American males killing each other for a specific brand of basketball shoe. Conversely, Elizabeth Chin defeats this myth of "combat consumerism" in her recent ethnographic study Purchasing Power. By studying a group of young African American children in Newhallville, Connecticut, Chin develops and explains a new brand of consumer culture that many previous anthropologists fail to recognize. Chin's research contradicts the stereotypical images in society and those portrayed by the media. She defines a new image of African American youth consumer culture-one that goes against commodity fetishism and the need for brand name goods. She discovers one that deals with the harsh world of being poor and black where opportunity and survival are major factors of consumer culture. Chin demonstrates the complexity of this issue by displaying how it is woven in with and affected by society. In this way, she relates consumerism to social injustices, race relations, class diversity, gender differences, cultural baggage and social relationships. Thus, Elizabeth Chin's book Purchasing Power is an informative and profound piece that intrigues the reader with an alternative image of Black Kids and American Consumer Culture.
Throughout her book, Elizabeth Chin does a tremendous job of blending anthropological research information (both others' and her own), and her engaging style of prose writing. This is evident from the onset of the book. In her first two chapters, Chin not only effectively conveys the purpose and results of her work (pp. 4-6), but also does so in a way that the reader is intrigued by the personal stories she tells about the children she interviewed in Newhallville. Her ongoing connections between theories and real life issues with Asia, Natalia, and Tionna are especially strong at the beginning of the book. In this way, readers are compelled to not only understand Chin's idea of the consumer sphere as a medium for social inequality (p. 23), but also to learn and discover what consumer life is like for the specific children interviewed.
In chapter two, Shadow of Whiteness, Chin briefly relates several different ideas from theorists such as Marx, Willis, Genovese and Fisk to her work. For some readers who are less familiar with these pieces, this section might seem somewhat confusing and a little burdensome. In this situation, more background information on the main ideas of the theorists' works would have been helpful. However, one must understand that Chin's overall purpose of the book is not to explain previous anthropological research, but to explain how her participant-observer approach to her ethnographic study of Newhallville children is important to consumer culture.
Chin's Shadow of Whiteness chapter is also very strong with the discussion of similarities between slavery and present-day consumerism. Chin illustrates how current stereotypical attitudes of black consumption have been deeply rooted in society since the time of slavery. Her discussion of slave fashion (pp. 39-41) is especially powerful and affective to her argument. Chin could easily build upon her ideas in this section and create a more in-depth anthropological comparison.
A final section in chapter two that was particularly strong was the analysis of "combat consumerism" and how society feeds on hyperbolized media stories and fraudulent police theories. Chin states several stories of juvenile violence where the media has portrayed the youth criminals as extremely brutal because of trivial material goods desired. Chin's reaction to this societal phenomenon is valid and influential in her overall argument of the book. Chin forcefully conveys her point when she writes,
The understanding that kids like those profiled above are somehow typical combat consumers not only misreads their consumer patterns at material levels but misinterprets the social impact and genesis of these patterns. It is a portrayal tapping a particularly insidious American myth: that the poor are highly susceptible to commodity fetishism, that they are addicted to brands, and that they are willing to acquire expensive things even at the cost of their own (or someone else's) health and/or well-being. Connected to this idea is a whole rat's nest of assumptions about poverty, money, and consumption: that the poor are poor primarily due to their own lack of discipline and self-control; that the poor do not know how to economize or prioritize expenses; and that the commitment of the poor to consume somehow ends up costing "us," whether through crime, welfare, dependency, teenage motherhood; that these depravities lead to murder, drugs, sex crimes. (pp. 56-57)
At this point in her book, Chin returns her focus to her work with the Newhallville children. A common theme begins to come forth throughout the next few chapters. Chin does a tremendous job of demonstrating how social relationships influence consumption. This is first evident in her section on "School Lunch," and later in the accounts of shopping sprees where children decided to spend money on family members. These sections have vast similarities to previous anthropological research on kinship and reciprocity, especially those who have completed fieldwork like Malinowski's research on the Kula. Chin could have enhanced her argument by examining the similarities in the research. In this way, Chin could have been able to generalize that the young African Americans in Newhallville are not a special case of consumer culture, but share similar characteristics of other cultures and societies.
As briefly stated in the previous paragraph, the idea of generalization seems to be one point that Chin fails to address adequately in her book. Although her research focuses on Newhallville children, it would not be out of her anthropological context to try and generalize from her results. Since she fails to sufficiently generalize her ideas, the sub-title of her book is resultantly problematic. Chin blatantly states that Purchasing Power will pertain to "Black Kids and American Consumer Culture." With Chin's choice to write specifically on black Newhallville kids, she consequently should not place them in the category of all black kids without stating the possible similarities or differences.

Further research topics that should have been considered in Purchasing Power that would have enhanced the overall argument would have been to interview different ages of children. The choice of using third and fourth grade children might have been a slightly young age to examine. Unlike the Newhallville children, I personally grew up in an upper-middle class family in a middle-class community. However, at this age I did not really understand consumerism and what I truly desired. I found myself purchasing many material goods for other people, similar to the children in Chin's study. Chin possibly decided to use this age group because this could be a truer form of consumer culture, one before society was able to taint consumer choices. An older group of children might have been affected more by society. In either case, using different age groups would still be an interesting anthropological research topic to consider.
One final idea that would enhance the study would be to examine how a child from a socioeconomic situation like Newhallville would react when placed in a different socioeconomic position. For example, would his or her consumerism change when placed in the care of a family who was from a higher-class community? Would the child then begin to find commodity fetishism and the need for brand name goods important? Today in my small town community of Lewistown, Pennsylvania, many families host foster children. It is an amazing phenomenon to witness how children from lower class cities adapt to the consumer culture of the majority middle class population. They begin to shift their priority of buying necessary, conservative items to buying higher-priced brand name goods.
Overall, Elizabeth Chin's recent book Purchasing Power is an intriguing and thoughtful book that displays a different type of consumer culture. Unlike many previous anthropological studies and the media, her research shows how commodity fetishism and brand name goods do not dominant lower socioeconomic children of Newhallville, Connecticut. Instead there is often a great deal of prioritizing and economic discipline with their consumer choices. Furthermore, the social injustices, race relations, class diversity, gender differences, and social relationships around them shape their consumer culture. Chin uses an informative, yet almost amusing style of writing that effectively develops her argument. Although there are several areas in which her book could have been stronger, her ethnographic work with the children is tremendous and well worth the reader's time. Therefore, Elizabeth Chin's Purchasing Power is an engaging and alternative theoretical model of African American youth consumer


Sambo Sahib : the story of Little Black Sambo and Helen Bannerman
Published in Hardcover by Harris (1981)
Author: Elizabeth Hay
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A Useful Book
I found this book useful in my research of Helen Bannerman, and the controversy surrounding her first and most famous work, Little Black Sambo. The author gives a good glimps of Bannerman's life, and gives an excellent arguement that "Sambo" was not a racist work, but rather that the racial overtones where added in pirated copies. I recomend this work to anyone who has an interest in Bannermans life, or the topic of racism in childrens literature.


Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)
Published in Hardcover by Oxford University Press (April, 1988)
Authors: Elizabeth H. Keckley and James Olney
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LOUSY !!!!!!!!!!!
This book was VERY,VERY DISAPPOINTING!It had only 2 chapters on 30yrs.of being a SLAVE(if you can believe that!) and 13 CHAPTERS
on 4 yrs. in the White House!!
GO FIGURE!!!!! I am SO SORRY I had my daughter get this book for me for Mother's DAY!

Intersting...
The story/diary it self I found wasn't written very good.However I found Ms.Keckley's relationship with Mrs.Mary Todd Lincoln and her family intersting.
She gave some insightfll thoughts about Mary and Abraham that was quite a treat to read.

Beautifully Written!
I got a copy of this book from a book fair not on purpose. As a non-native English learner, what strikes me is the ability of Keckley to express rich emotions in very simple words and sentences. I always like reading first person narratives, fictions or true stories, but seldom find one as captivating as this. A five-star from me and it's a pity she didn't seem
to have written other books.


Black Oxen
Published in Hardcover by Farrar Straus & Giroux (July, 2001)
Author: Elizabeth Knox
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Episodic Sludge
There are some good things about this novel. Specific episodes in the book take off and you find yourself burning 15 pages to find what happened. Some of the characters are interesting and unique. The construction is episodic with story lines cut and pasted like reading a painting from the cubist school. Chunks of the story are cut out and displaced into other parts of the story, creating a disjointed reading experience. This might have been a successful artistic technique if it weren't also weighed down by a huge cast of characters, so large that the publisher had to print a whole listing before you get to the first chapter. To complicate this, some of the characters are known by different names which also change depending on the timeline that is also cut and distributed throughout the story. To comlicate this, characters go from being homosexual to bisexual; so you have to identify who it is, what name they're going by, and whether they like guys or gals at the moment. In short, this book is extremely confusing. Knox needs a new editor; this relationship did not work well. Here are some examples of how the story didn't follow through for me. There is a whole segment on how a girl loves her horse. So, of course, two characters feel it's their mission to find the elusive horse and dismember it. They get naked, hack up the horse, bury it, wash in a stream, one guy tries to seduce the other only to have the other one try to kill himself, then the girl shows up, they get out and a flood comes, the dismembered horse floats by, and the story line is dropped. What's the point? To complicate these matters, there are secret societies whose members are unidentified. At one point, the characters are at a funeral. Rather than being affected by the sorrow in the scene, I was trying to remember who it was that died and what her relationship was to the people at the funeral. At the end, someone tells Carme that she's a mother, but I could never figure out who was speaking. After this book, I felt like I needed a study group to figure out what went on. Unfortunately, for all its promise, the read is not worth the effort.

Worth the effort
Readers who enjoyed Elizabeth Knox's bestseller The Vintner's Luck will find the same unique style and rich characters in Black Oxen. But be warned, it is a long and demanding read. Central to the book is a similar character to the angel in The Vintner's Luck. Ido/Walter is a man who is not quite human. He is a healer, a visionary, bisexual and capable of living in two worlds. He is immensely fascinating which is necessary to get you through 503 pages of a rich and complex story which at times is very hard to keep track of. As with The Vintner' Luck, Knox's research and knowledge of her topics from revolutionaries in Latin America to complex surgical terms, to the world of television in Hollywood seems flawless. Fans of The Vintner's Luck will remember that even though it was convincingly set in France, unbelievably Knox had never visited the country before writing the book. Knox's writing is delightful in its sense of imagery and romanticism and beautiful in its structure and form. You can't help but get involved with every character and while this is immensely satisfying as a reader to be challenged so thoroughly there are times when you just have to stop reading and sort all the information and the characters into their correct time zone and family connections. This would not have been a problem had I been able to devote a decent chunk of time to reading the book instead of spacing it out over several weeks. I found myself wondering at the intensity of the author and her ability to fill page after page with such wonderful writing and information. I am going to re-read Black Oxen ( after I dip into a lighter read for a change of pace) as I finished it last night and I'm still not quite sure of the conclusions I should have drawn from it, or even if Knox intends us to have any conclusions. Perhaps like good poetry or music, we will all take our own individual meaning from this piece of work. A much more difficult read than The Vintner's Luck as Black Oxen feels 10 times more intense. Some readers may be unwilling to put in the time, but I highly recommend you do.


The Black Velvet Gown (Soundings/12 Audio Cassettes)
Published in Audio Cassette by Isis Audio (July, 1994)
Authors: Catherine Cookson and Elizabeth Henry
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Never judge a Cookson story by its cover!
I suppose that dear reader could stereotype this novel and question why a man would read it. Considering the title and all, I guess that's a classic case of judging the book by its cover, isn't it? Because the title doesn't contain, the words "Kill," "Maim," "Suspect," "Massacre," etc., it's likely that this story would be easily missed. I'm glad that I don't fall for all of that stereotypical hype.

A young woman with four children finds herself widowed in a small mining town in England. She and her children are somewhat literate, being that they can read some and write their names. This particular talent seems threatening to her peers and she is treated as somewhat of an outcast. Finding little compassion for her loss, she is forced to uproot and go into the next town in search of a means to support herself and her family. She takes up residence as a housekeeper in the country manor of a reclusive gentleman who eventually teaches her children to read and write and introduces them to the finer things in life. But always at a price, we quickly observe.

Being the second Cookson book that I've been lucky enough to read, I can admit that she remains consistent. She chooses England in the early 1800's as her setting. Her characters speak (through her words) in that Queen's English that seems to be adopted by people of what was considered a low position on the social ladder. Reading this book was like learning a foreign language, but in an enjoyable way.

The best part about Cookson's writing is that she doesn't place all of her efforts in making the reader second guess what is going to happen. She doesn't present a mystery, murder, or crisis of some kind that would be clearly considered point "A" and spend the entire story leading the characters and the reader in the direction of point "B." If these points do exist in her efforts, the reader isn't aware of it. We just follow along with the story and read about someone's life. Life for most of us is not just a matter of getting from "A" to "B," where someone on the outside (such as dear reader) knows how we'll get from one place to the other.

I'm still trying to reconcile the title of the story, since the actual "black velvet gown" seemed like such an insignificant role in the story. But then again, I couldn't think of a better title that didn't sound like a cliché. Maybe it's this sort of literary obscurity that makes me want to read the rest of Cookson's work. I assure you that I'll read more and recommend that dear reader do the same.


When the Black Lotus Blooms
Published in Paperback by Unnameable Press (August, 1990)
Author: Elizabeth A. Saunders
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African American Acculturation : Deconstructing Race and Reviving Culture
Published in Hardcover by Sage Publications (May, 1996)
Authors: Hope Landrine and Elizabeth A. Klonoff
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African American Women: A Study of Will and Success
Published in Paperback by McFarland & Company (December, 1992)
Author: Elizabeth A. Peterson
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Along Came a Black Bird
Published in Hardcover by Lippincott (August, 1988)
Author: Elizabeth Wild
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America Sings: Stories and Songs of Our Country's Growth
Published in Hardcover by Random House (Merchandising) (June, 1950)
Authors: Carl Carmer and Elizabeth Black Carmer
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