Missy Kubitschek's book does the impossible: she presents a thoughtful, educated, and appreciative reading of Morrison that makes these wonderful novels even more accessible than even good readers could imagine. For teachers who want to provide their students with a superb critical model, here it is. Look at the literate biographical first chapter. The "contexts" chapter moves smoothly and clearly through the critical whitewater of postmodernism, orality, and black identity. The chapters focusing on individual Morrison novels (even the daunting _Paradise_) illuminate Morrison's careful plot and characterization strategies. Best of all, each chapter showcases a particular critical strategy (formalist, historicist, archetypal, "Afro-modernist," etc.) as a lens through which to read the text. This is not only a brilliant teaching strategy, it's delightfully readable. I was surprised and moved all over again at the author's deft discussion of marigolds in _Bluest Eye_ and its subtle evocation of the Demeter/Persephone theme. It's the best discussion I've read of _Paradise_ and the chapter on _Sula_ brought that novel's power home to me years after my first reading of it. This is criticism at its very best.

Toni Morrsion's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved, deals with the self-sacrifice of motherhood, the black experience in America, and an unescapable history which will haunt the bravest at heart. First, she creates an elaborate, detailed story for the reader and secondly, she spins the literary web together by alterating between past and present. Morrison does an extraordinary job in portaying the trials and tribulations of slavery shortly after the Civil War. Also, Toni's greatest aspect and technique of Beloved, is her use of the past ruling the present, this enables the reader to know more about the character than the character may know about themself. The theme of the novel which I found most intriguing was the aura of the book itself. The gothic tale conjured some of the most deep-rooted feelings from my soul. The book is definately a masterpiece of its time and history as well. And it feels extraordinary to have a piece of history in the palms of your hands.

There's only one way to remember them:reading
and humming the "song"they inspire along the
poetical and invoking lines of an almost shamanic
incantation rising to bring them back into
life so that we meet,know and re-bury them with love and
awe,with respect and recognition of
a sacrifice as supreme as crucifying itself.
They are all deities in the lost and sacred
society bush of ancestors long forgotten and recalled when the moments are
supreme, when it comes to love, life
and death: Beloved, Macon Dead, Violet, Circe...

There is nothing difficult in reading Ms Morrison. She is very detailed and that requires concentration. She answers no questions for you and perhaps that is what makes some readers say she is too complicated. If you remember the character, when she jumps forward or backward in the story, it is easy to pick up where she left off. Beloved is merely a song about a woman's commitment to not suffering any more indignities if it were in her power not to do so. Perhaps her initial method was extreme but then again, what is not extreme about enslavement? What is not extreme about a group of people having no history beyond the 19th century? What is difficult about her novels is that you have to have the answers to these questions before you start reading.

The cover art, "Wanted Poster No. 17" by Charles White, drew me again and again into the depths of this book. It shows a black woman with her hands on the shoulders of a small black boy. Beside them are the first names and ages of faceless persons as they might be shown on a list of slaves to be offered at an auction. The faces of the woman and boy are very human and sensitive as if they are about to speak of what they have seen and heard.

Philip M. Weinstein, Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at Swarthmore College, begins with his own Southern upbringing by a black woman. The love felt for that black woman was not enough to lead him into some enlightened knowledge of her (or even a visit to her home)until 23 years after her death! Her sister said, when he entered her home, "I've been waiting 23 years for this visit."

When Faulkner writes about Dilsey in "The Sound and the Fury" he is drawing upon the experience he had of being raised by a black woman. Dilsey never expresses personal doubt or pain or need. For such was Faulkner's experience of Callie Walker who raised him. He had no concept of the other world in which she lived and moved and had her being.

Likewise, Morrison has her blind spots. When she seeks to render the white Bodwin in "Beloved" she gives a strong but limited portrait, "a limited but precious truth." As Bodwin is about to enter the house where he was born and has not been in 30 years he thinks merely about the unbearable heat, his toy soldiers and watchless chain. These are nearly his last thoughts in this life were it not for the abortive attempt on his life by the confused Sethe.

The limited portraits by Faulkner and Morrison remind us of both the important contributions they have made to our understanding of their experiences and the need for other pieces of the human puzzle. The last word is not said in having said so much that is gripping and true.

Weinstein calls us to a humility that says where we are without the arrogance of thinking we have said/watched (or heard/seen) it all.

Words Of Ages: Witnessing U.S. History Through Literature is a remarkable 320 page trade paperback book that takes a unique, ground-breaking approach to showcase American history by using letters, journal entries, short stories, and poetry to illustrate the American experience through pen of some of America's greatest authors and historical figures. Included are more than 125 excerpts from such luminaries as Booker T. Washington, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Tom Wolf, Thomas Paine, Chief Tecumseh, Frederick Douglass, Robert Frost, and a host of other to provide an accessible context for understanding the events, places, and people that shaped American history, culture and politics. Words Of Ages is divided chronological into units ranging from "Voices of a Revolution" and "Civil War and Reconstruction", to "Social Critics and Reformers" and "The Vietnam Years". This dynamic, interdisciplinary blending of literature, history, and art provide a most unusual, effective, and academically sound approach that will be read with enthusiasm by anyone with an interest in American history.

This book was very interesting and i enjoyed the courage of a young black man to stand up for his rights.

In Egypt, I met an extraordinary American.
"I was born in New York, but have only lived in pockets of it. In Paris, I lived in all parts of the city - on the Right Bank and on the Left, among the bourgeoisie and among les miserables, and knew all kinds of people from pimps and prostitutes in Pigalle to Egyptian bankers in Nueilly. This may sound unprincipled or even obscurely immoral: I found it healthy. I love to talk to people, all kinds of people, and almost everyone, as I hope we still know, loves a man who loves to listen," he said.
"The perpetual dealing with people very different from myself caused a shattering in me of preconceptions I scarcely knew I held. This reassessment, which can be very painful, is also very valuable."
His name is Mr. Baldwin, and I cherish this new acquaintance because his ideas have had such profound impact on my views of Egypt. I wanted to know the people, but as I reach out for them, sometimes, I'm shocked by what I see. I see people sleeping on the concrete patios along the Nile - many of them have migrated from the farmlands because they can make more money for their families if they work in Cairo. But desert nights can be bitter cold in January, and it cuts my heart. Yet, Mr. Baldwin's message is well heeded. The same problems of inner city growth that come with development in Egypt also came with development in Britain one hundred years ago. American inner city schools and slums still reflect this challenge.
Would I have walked into the slums of Chicago if I were there? Would I have strolled through the southwest side of Kansas City or east St. Louis? Would I have walked into the anti-developing city blocks of L.A. if I were in America? Of course not. So why is it that traveling abroad opens my eyes to poverty in America? Why couldn't I see it when I was there? I don't know why this happens, but James Baldwin was right - absolutely right when he said that this reassessment, which can be very painful is also very valuable.
I have been told that the housing shortage in Egypt provided the impetus for many people to move into the spacious mausoleums in the old city graveyard. The international visitors call it, "The City of the Dead," and tourists go there and gawk at poverty creating a makeshift freak show out of human suffering. Then I learned that the housing shortage in Los Angeles provided the impetus for many people to move into mausoleums, but no one goes to gawk at them. In fact, there seems to be a kind of American denial that such things could ever happen in the land of milk and honey.
As I hear of people talking about human rights violations in Egypt, I think of the title of James Baldwin's book: Nobody Knows My Name. I think of James Byrd who was dragged to death behind a pickup truck. I think of the threats of millennium violence that frightened black American families so much that they bought guns and stayed home for the New Year. I think of the tiny city in Texas who voted Spanish as their city's official language and then received death threats from all over the nation. Of course, if you asked any American about human rights violations, they would tell you that this is something that happens in China or Africa. It's a painful realization that it might happen in MY country. Growing up in the American school system, I came to idolize Abraham Lincoln's courage and George Washington's integrity. The universal ideas of human value and dignity that we believe to be inalienable are not, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so wisely told us, being applied universally in our country. These facts go against the ideals and values of our nation - they don't support the concepts of the free and the brave.
"It is a complex fate to be an American," Henry James observed. James Baldwin awakened me to that complexity in a way so subtle, so gentle and yet, so powerfully painful.
He awakened me to the hard realities of the American people, most of whom will never read or digest his work. They would dismiss him. But his vision is not to be dismissed. His writing illustrates that the responsibility of this future lies in the hands of blind people. People who refuse to see American neighborhoods and American people for what they really are. We can't improve until we accept the starting point. This lofty ideal of what we should be and blind obstinacy to what we are is killing us.
"Europe has what we do not have yet," Baldwin said. "A sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a new sense of life's possibilities."
Egypt has what we do not yet have - a clear and present sense of unity - an admiration for sacrifice for the whole of the group - the nuclear family, the extended family, the community. And we have absolutely nothing that Egypt needs, except, if you ask the younger generation: Nike shoes. In fact, this is precisely what Egyptians do not need. They do not need the destructive, greed-inspiring and greed-glorifying economic development of the West.

"In this endeavor to wed the vision of the Old World with that of the New, it is the writer, not the statesman, who is our strongest arm. Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have tangible effect on the world." - James Baldwin

People who already like Baldwin will not have to be sold on a volume that contains all his essays. This is an incredible resource to have. My only quibble is that the book is not indexed. With a Nobel laureate as an editor, one would expect such a rudimentary tool. Those who have heard about Baldwin's powerful prose but who are afraid that they will be bored should cast aside those doubts. This collection is easily readable from cover to cover. Essays on equality for black Americans are not simply of historical interest as Baldwin displays in such essays his basically humanistic philosophy which can apply universally. Get your notebook out to take down all his fabulous quotes. Okay, now buy the book!

Playing in the Dark is a revelation, but not the one intended by its author. What is revealed mainly is just how close to hopeless race relations in this country have come to be. Here we have a writer of nearly undisputed stature, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who yet cannot summon objectivity on the subject of race, and who offers what seems essentially a bit of personal venting disguised as a serious academic proposal. Not that there isn't an interesting idea at the core of the book, but it's offered up as far more grand than it is, and with such thorough disingenuousness that the reader's main focus is changed very early on from an evaluation of her idea to a voyeuristic obsessing about Ms. Morrison's indecent exposure. Why would she let this book be printed?

The author's claimed intention is stated relatively plainly: "...to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions." (Page 11.) But much of the book reads for all the world like the work of a sophomore who has learned that her instructor fancies Martin Heidegger and who has checked out a translation of Being and Time to serve as a model for her first essay. Here's a fairly typical example: "For excellent reasons of state - because European sources of cultural hegemony were dispersed but not yet valorized in the new country - the process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony." (Page 8.) This is the writing of a Nobel laureate? Heidegger's writing was required, it seems to me, by his inaccessible subject; by comparison, Ms. Morrison's subject is elementary.

This is not to say that the author doesn't occasionally reach the levels of creative expression for which she is justly so well known, it's just that in this work her gift seems impotent against her anger. Try though she does to disguise her feelings ("My project rises from delight, not disappointment." Page 4.), it doesn't work, and its failure manifests itself in the oddest ways ("It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color; it was that this color "meant" something.... One supposes that if Africans all had three eyes or one ear, the significance of that difference from the smaller but conquering European invaders would also have been found to have meaning." Page 49. Presumably the Japanese would have been, racially, even less appropriate as slave owners).

It seems, finally, that it is Ms. Morrison who is playing in the dark. She senses it, but she can't find the words to say it.

I always felt that to truly say that one is literate is to be able to state equivocally that one has read a book by Toni Morrison or Stephen Hawking. Sure, Aristotle and Shakespeare are giants, but they were from ages ago. Morrison and Hawking are contemporary thinkers.

Instead of dealing with Morrison the storyteller, I chose to read Morrison the academic analyst in the form of "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination". And, boy, could I not have chosen a more challenging book.

Morrison skillfully directs the reader's attention to how American literature abounds with overt and/or covert attempts to perpetuate the white male's superiority and the black man's inferiority. She shows how the "Africanist" influence can be found in the respective characters, their dialogues, and their interaction with their white counterparts. By citing examples from Hemingway, Poe, and Cather, the author makes a reader contemplate the author's symbolism and intent. I know that I will look at "great" American works with increased scrutiny.

I wish that she had tackled Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind".

As one of America's most respected writers and a proponent of civil and women's rights, Miss Morrison uses her talent wisely here in this riveting exposé.

Mind you, there are a few words that not even the context will reveal their meanings; therefore, a dictionary would be handy to have around. But, the "research" is well worth it for the book is a feast for the mind.

Bring on Stephen now!

When I first read this amazing criticism on American literary history, I finally got it. A huge cloud of misunderstanding and empty justifications lifted from above my head, and I, for the first time, learned how to critically analyze a text. Much more, I learned how to engage with a history of texts. Playing in the Dark effectively chronicles the absence or misconstruction of African-Americans in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemmingway. Morrison's illuminations on how the presence of black is often conflated with evil and lurking metaphores, while white is typically reduced to all that is pure is truly brought to life through the literary examples she utilizes. Further, her argument concerning how Africanism was/is used as a distancing mechanism to ensure hegemony retains its power is most likely the most well developed argument of its kind.

All of Morrison's thoughts are hopefully (and I stress hopefully with utopian blinders on) already flying through the psyches of Americans, but Playing in the Dark gives concrete words to abstract thoughts. This book is an absolute must read for anyone who plans to critically engage in literature.

This is a good compliation of Huey Newton's speeches and writings. The 1967 essay "Fear and Doubt" is a good summation of the psychological challenges Black men (particularly those in the ghettoes and who may lack education) face then and now. He also presents some progressive ideas on multiethnic coalitions being organized to fight oppression worldwide.

However, the writings take a downward turn around the time that Newton had been confirmed to have been taking hard drugs. His 1971 Yale speech is a mess of long-winded Marxist psychobabble and his defense of Melvin Van Peebles' ... pseudorevolutionary film "Sweet Sweetback" is laughable to those who are familiar with this ... film. Newton was killed in a drug deal gone bad some 17 years after this book appeared, and many of his earlier brilliant ideas died with him. A testament to the destruction of drugs.

Huey does a remarkable job in explaining many of viewpoints and objectives of the Black Panther Party. If you really want to gain an understanding of the Black Panther Party, especially Huey, this is a must read.

The political thinking and organizing of Huey P. was par none! Too bad about his problems with cocaine. Read also, of course: Seize the Time by Bobby Seale. To move beyond Huey, I recommend "Black Panther Party [Reconsidered].

I've read SOS going on four or five times now, floored, awestruck, enraptured each time, every twist and turn a new surprise arrives. Milkman is a wonderful archetype for a Black man searching for what he can claim as his own. His mind, his body, his sex, money? What is his and not tainted by the past, by racism, by internal family feuding? This is what I call a "Patience Book", you have to sit with it the way you would sit with a child on a Sunday afternoon. Patience. You have to breathe in rhythm with this book. Morrison is one of those few writers that it's silly to ask all of your questions of even after you finish the book. Pick it right back up and breathe, savor each page, have patience. It is not an easy read for it is literature and you are reading, truly reading. Not surfing through pulp fiction knwoing that the hero lives, the heroine is saved and everybody sleeps well on the last page. Uh uh. Patience. What else but patience could you use to understand Magdalene, Pilate, Corinthians? My all time, all time, all time favorite literary scene that chills me, tears me up, knocks me around hard and then uplifts me: Pilate at the funeral. "That was my baby, That's my baby, AND SHE WAS LOVED!"

Honey, welcome to real African American literature, impossible to translate to film for this is patience reading. Patience, free at last, free at last!

Song of Solomon is one of the greatest books written in the 20th century. Many writers can tell thoroughly engaging stories, write believable characters, and present it in insightful, clever prose. Morrison does all of these things and a level beyond, in some instances several levels.

Song of Solomon is probably the most brilliantly thought out stories ever put to paper. Morrison adds little details here and there early in the novel, and many times throughout, that seem to be used only to show the eccentricty of the characters or just to throw a little humor in there. But every single story behind the story, every little 'joke' or amusing tidbit about some characters past ties together in the final chapters in a literary feat I have yet to seen matched.

Dickens presented stories wide in scope, with many characters and symbols to show a culture or to present a political idea. Morrison does the same, only she makes every word matter. THERE IS A REASON you learn such and such about Pilate in chapter 2, or that this comment is made about Guitar by this character, and it all jells, aboslutely, thoroughly beautifully by the close of the book.

Song of Solomon cannot receive enough superlatives from me. I have yet to read Beloved or Jazz, Morrison's other two supposed masterworks, but I can only hope I will be equally if not moreso dazzled by them.

When you reread Song of Solomon, as I have done twice, you not only come to find the secrets and reasons hidden along the backroads and tangents of the characters' lives that went previously unnoticed, but to re-immerse yourself in the brilliance of the story that has always been and will always be there.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison is a novel that everyone should read. It leads us through the family history, failures, successes, and self-discovery of Macon Dead III (Milkman). Morrison allows the reader a glimpse into the culture and everyday life of black families. We are along for the ride while Milkman discovers mysteries from the past and develops himself into a man. The reader is also given the opportunity to see racism in the worst degree. The retaliation of the Seven Days represents the actions of many early violent civil rights groups. Morrison deals with everyday issues such as love, rejection, depression, and obsession in her telling of Hagar. She depicts the strong bonds made between women through Pilate, Ruth, Hagar, and Reba. The theme of flying is present throughout the novel and relates the characters with slave stories and the belief that humans could fly to escape hardships. Song of Solomon is an excellent novel that I recommend to anyone looking for a book involving drama, mystery, and excitement. Even though Toni Morrison is portrayed as an author whose works represent that black community, Song of Solomon can be related to the lives of anyone: a family history.