Average customer rating:
- NIGHTJOHN
- Slave Girl Learns to Read
- Too Much Explicit Language
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<3 literarture class
- NightJohn
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Nightjohn
Gary Paulsen
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ASIN: 0440219361
Release Date: 1995-01-01 |
Amazon.com
Imagine being beaten for learning to read, shackled and whipped for learning a few letters of the alphabet. Now, imagine a man brave enough to risk torture in order to teach others how to read; his name is Nightjohn, and he sneaks into the slave camps at night to teach other slaves how to read and write. Celebrated author Gary Paulsen writes a searing meditation on why the ability to read and write is radical, empowering , and so necessary to our freedom. These skills threaten our oppressors because they allow us to communicate--to learn the real status of our slavery and to seek liberation. In this tightly written, painful, joyous little novel is a key that may unlock the power of reading for even the most reluctant teens.
Book Description
"To know things, for us to know things, is bad for them. We get to wanting and when we get to wanting it's bad for them. They thinks we want what they got . . . . That's why they don't want us reading." --Nightjohn
"I didn't know what letters was, not what they meant, but I thought it might be something I wanted to know. To learn." -- Sarny
Sarny, a female slave at the Waller plantation, first sees Nightjohn when he is brought there with a rope around his neck, his body covered in scars.
He had escaped north to freedom, but he came back--came back to teach reading. Knowing that the penalty for reading is dismemberment Nightjohn still retumed to slavery to teach others how to read. And twelve-year-old Sarny is willing to take the risk to learn.
Set in the 1850s, Gary Paulsen's groundbreaking new novel is unlike anything else the award-winning author has written. It is a meticulously researched, historically accurate, and artistically crafted portrayal of a grim time in our nation's past, brought to light through the personal history of two unforgettable characters.
Customer Reviews:
NIGHTJOHN.......2007-09-17
This book was an excellent read. It gave a real insight into what the slaves went through in the 18th and 19th centuries and the hardships they endured; however, many did everything they could to get away from these horrible situations. It was a sad story but well worth reading.
Slave Girl Learns to Read.......2007-07-02
Sarny was a twelve-year-old slave girl living with many other slaves on the farm of a cruel slave owner. She never really thought much about her own situation, but just carried on from day to day. She knew the things that would get her into trouble and tried her best not to do them.
John, a new slave, looks like trouble. His back is completely scarred, like he has been whipped many times. He doesn't seem like the kind of slave who will be obedient, and he confirms this assumption when he says that he managed to escape to freedom once but was caught when he came back to help those who were still slaves.
In exchange for a little tobacco Sarny had hidden away, John begins to teach her the letters of the alphabet, saying that when slaves are able to read and write, they will have the power to record what is happening to them, which is something white slave owners don't want. Sarny knows that being able to read and write is something that she would be greatly punished for if her master found out, but she can't seem to resist the letters John shows her. But Sarny is careless with her writing. Will she end up causing trouble for everyone around her?
John was a great character. He was noble and strong and brave, which I would imagine were hard qualities to hold onto if a person were a slave. I found it hard to believe that Sarny's owner would have bought John when his scars showed that he was obviously trouble to his owners. I'd think the slave owner would also have been much more careful to make sure he couldn't influence any others like he influenced Sarny.
Too Much Explicit Language.......2007-06-09
I was not prepared for the language this book had in it! I did expect a few curse words to be included because of the subject matter. But I was not prepared for parts of the book to be totally littered with God's name being used in the manner it was. I was disappointed in this because, up till now, we have loved the Gary Paulsen books we have read. The book is very good and gives a good picture of what really went on. But our family, personally, could have done without the language.
I
<3 literarture class.......2007-04-17
i bet 10 bucks that half of the class is going to cut and paste one of these reviews. i probably will to.
P.S. i here that this is a pretty good book, read it....or else
NightJohn.......2007-03-30
Review of Nightjohn, march 28,2007
Review by Jiang,WeiKai
If you are finding any information or want to know more about slavery, this is the book that you need to read.
Nightjohn, a slave with a little knowledge of read and write.And he never keep the knowledge just to him.He started to teach young slaves how to read and write,anyway things were not always going right.His master,Waller,found out everything,and pusished him by whiping him and cut his toe off.
This book had a great historial fiation event,and also easy to read and have alot of information of slavery,so i give this book five out of five star.
Average customer rating:
- Could have used a little editing
- I loved this book.
- A NOVELISTIC TREATMENT OF NAT TURNER'S REBELLION
- The Standard
- The South Rises Again in all its Historically Inaccurate Glory
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The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron
Manufacturer: Vintage
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ASIN: 0679736638
Release Date: 1992-11-10 |
Book Description
In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery...
The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is not only a masterpiece of storytelling; is also reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, Willie Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations--and hopes--which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage.
From the Hardcover edition.
Download Description
Powerful, prize-winning 1967 novel depicts the odyssey of Nat Turner, leader of first slave revolt in the US. Styron's novel was profoundly controversial; some felt that's a white author had no right to the subject matter. By the acclaimed author of SOP
Customer Reviews:
Could have used a little editing .......2007-04-04
I didn't give this three stars because of the controversy around racism. It's historical fiction, fiction being the key word. And I didn't really pick up that tone from it at all. I thought it was an innovative retelling using what information we do know and filling in the blanks from there. The reason I gave it three stars is because it contained all sorts of things that I felt could have been cut from the book and it wouldn't have mattered. I almost gave up on it in the second section. I'm glad I finished it, but it was a little tough to keep interest in it.
I loved this book........2007-02-08
I read this book for my book club and I thought it was beautifully written. It has stayed with me for weeks now. I love when a book does that. I'm glad I wasn't swayed by controversy. I had no problem with the fact that the author was white and using a black voice(maybe because I'm white - but I do like when an author gets the voice right and I thought Styron did that). I didn't understand the charges of racism after reading the book. Sometimes I wonder if, what some people find uncomfortable, they label as racist or sexist or whatever. Anyway, I would encourage everyone to read this book because it gave me a fresh awareness of a huge part of U.S. history, it reminded me that there are always gray areas to consider and it was a great novel. You might think so too.
A NOVELISTIC TREATMENT OF NAT TURNER'S REBELLION .......2006-11-08
I came of political age during the civil rights struggle here in America in the early 1960's. Part and parcel with that awakening struggle came an increased interest in the roots of the black struggle, especially in slavery times. Such intellectuals as Herbert Apteker, the Genoveses, the Foners, Harold Cruise, James Baldwin, John Hope Franklin and others, black and white, were very interested in exploring or discovering a black resistance to the conditions of slavery not apparent on any then general reading of the black experience in America. This is the place where the recently deceased William Styron and his novelistic interpretation of one aspect of that struggle- Nat Turner's Virginia slave rebellion enters the fray.
No Styron is not politically correct in his appreciation of Turner or his followers. Nor are latter day Southern whites and their sympathizers who have recoiled in horror at what expansion of Turner's rebellion might have meant for the `peculiar institution'. But being politically correct, etc. now or historically is beside the point. Slavery was brutal. Slavery brutalized whole generations of black people for a very long time. If one expects nature's noblemen and women to come out of such a process, one will be very sadly mistaken. That the white benificaries of this system were brutalized is a given. Human progress has come about through fits and starts not a seamless curve onward and upward. Nevertheless all our sympathies are with Nat and his fellow rebels.
Moreover, here are some things to think about if you are not worried about your political correctness status. Outside of John Brown at Harper's Ferry Turner's rebellion represented the highest achievement of resistance to the white slaveholders in the early 19th century. Although the fight was not pretty on either side every progressive today should stand in historical solidarity with that fight. Then one will understand not only that oppression oppresses but also that the military conditions for a successful rebellion for isolated blacks in pre- Civil War American were slim. The later incorporation of 200,000 black soldiers and sailors among the Northern forces in the Civil War are a very, very profound argument that once off the plantation blacks were as capable of bravery, courage and honor as an other American. As difficult as it is, if you do not have access to the original chronicles of the Turner uprising, read this book to get a flavor of how hard the struggle for the abolition of slavery in this country was going to be.
The Standard.......2006-08-25
For me, William Styron has written the standard from which to draw the historical novel. I say draw because an historical novel is just that; a novel. But even while the reader knows this, historical novels always seem to provoke some response framed by the light of a current outlook. This is ironic because the main attraction of historical novels (at least for me) is the escapist type pleasure that is found by immersing oneself in another world and time. This is the writer's accomplishment. William Styron does this in language and in pace so artfully that his book remains on my shelf. I keep 'The Confessions of Nat Turner' for its enjoyment and inspiration.
The South Rises Again in all its Historically Inaccurate Glory.......2006-04-22
I originally wrote a review of this book in 1999, titled "This is a racist book disguised as a work of art." It seems that I didn't explain well enough my objection to Styron's co-opting of the story of a real human being, Nat Turner, whose story was more accurately depicted in the 1831 book, "The Confessions of Nat Turner," by T.R. Gray. Not only did Styron steal the title of Gray's book, in which Gray recounts his interview with the real Nat Turner, but the incidents Styron invents for the sake of drama reveal his southern-bred racism.
Unlike his depiction in Styron's book, Nat Turner was married. Styron's invention of Turner's pivotal and conflicted relationship with a white woman, Margaret Whitehead, is entirely fictional. So is any self-doubt that Turner did the right thing by leading the revolt. In Gray's account, Turner did not express regret. There is so much more depth to Turner's life that is either fictionalized beyond recognition or left unexplored in this book.
Do those facts make a difference in a work of fiction? Yes. The parts Styron has unnecessarily fictionalized are key to the story he invented. Turner's fictional relationship with Margaret is saturated in the southern myth that black men are obsessed with white women -- lusting for the forbidden fruit, for which they must die. That Styron crawls into Nat Turner's skin in order to infect him with self-doubt about his mission emasculates Turner and diminishes his cause. What offends me most is that Nat Turner's life deserves to be explored by a modern author who does not condescend or patronize this African-American hero. Instead, we have William Styron's version of Turner's life, taken by many readers as fact.
If one prefers racist fiction posing as a legitimate account of a life, then one might enjoy wallowing in this version of "Confessions." But if one prefers reality, I recommend Gray's book as well as other accounts available about the slave revolt at Southampton, Virginia. Styron's book does not provide significant insights into Nat Turner, slave revolt or slavery itself. His book clouds the truth with the same kind of Reconstruction era distortions that spawned the hideous phenomenon of lynching.
Book Description
In this insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, examining the relationship between film, race and culture.
Norman K Denzin argues that the cinema, like society, treats all persons as equal but struggles to define and implement diversity, pluralism and multiculturalism. He goes on to argue that the cinema needs to honour racial and ethnic differences, in defining race in terms of both an opposition to, and acceptance of, the media's interpretations and representations of the American racial order.
Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination.
Book Description
Like so many "news events," the Rodney King incidents the beating, the trial and the uprising that followed have all but disappeared from public dialogue.
Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising keeps this public debate alive by exploring the connections between the incidents and the ordinary workings of cultural, political, and economic power in contemporary America. Its recurrent theme is the continuing though complicated significance of race in American society.
The Rodney King incidents raised a number of questions regarding the relationships between poverty, racial ideology, economic competition, and the exercise of political power. What is the relationship between the beating of Rodney King and the workings of racism in America? How was it possible for defense attorneys to convince a jury that the videotape it saw did not depict an excessive or unjustified use of violence? In the burning of Koreatown, what role did racial stereotypes of African Americans and Korean Americans play, and what role did various economic factors play? What is the significance of the fact that the L.A. police department, when responding to the uprising, sent its officers to Westwood but not Koreatown? And how, finally, are we to understand the fact that not all of Los Angeles' various Latino communities took part in the uprising?
Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising includes essays by prominent philosophers, social scientists, literary critics and legal scholars. They explore these issues from a variety of distinct, theoretical perspectives, offering a nuanced picture of the Rodney King incidents. Avoiding reductionism, they illuminate the complex interplay of ideological, political and economic forces impinging on urban America.
With America's black, Hispanic, and Asian populations continuing to grow, the issue of race has come to dominate political debates on public policy and educational struggles over multicultural curricula. Expressing cynicismwith "politics as usual," many Americans have felt the need to break from simplistic and stereotypical thinking about these issues.
Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising will be valuable reading not only to public policy makers and educators, but to anyone looking for serious and fresh insights into the question of race in contemporary America.
Contributors: Houston A. Baker, Jr.; Judith Butler; Sumi K. Cho; Kimberle Crenshaw; Mike Davis; Thomas L. Dumm; Walter C. Farrell, Jr.; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Robert Gooding-Williams; James H. Johnson, Jr.; Elaine H. Kim; Melvin L. Oliver; Michael Omi; Gary Peller; Cedric J. Robinson; Jerry Watts; Cornel West; Patricia Williams; Rhonda M. Williams; Howard Winant.
Book Description
This reader contains historical documents representing the contributions to American history from a wide range of African-American life and thought. The material is arranged chronologically from the colonial period to the present.
Book Description
This new reader comprises an extensive collection of primary and secondary documents of the American Civil Rights movement. These documents are complemented by analytical and interpretive essays by the editor, setting these documents in their historical, social, and political context. The seeds for the modern Civil Rights Movement were planted nearly a century ago within the black Baptist Church, labor unions, the black press, and organizations like the NAACP and the SNYC. Each of the seven sections of this book present a carefully chosen selection of newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, letters, speeches, reports, and legal documents, all chronicling the one aspect of the movement for black rights from the earliest days of post-Civil War segregation to the present. The works of eminent scholars, historians, legislators, and jurists alternate with the voices of movement leaders and followers, black politicians, black entertainers, and average citizens, all blending together to tell the story of struggle, failures, and successes on the road to equality for Black Americans.
Customer Reviews:
An Awesome Book and Author.......2001-03-21
Raymond D'Angelo is Chair of the Social Science department at the school I attend, St. Joseph's College in Patchogue, NY. I took a class he taught during the spring of 2001 called "The Civil Rights Movement." He used this book as the text for the course. He knows alot about this subject and the book was very well written. I highly recommend this book for both students and people interested in the topic. By the way all the proceeds go to the Selma Voting Rights Museum and the National Civil Rights Museum.
Amazon.com
Lynching, the extrajudicial punishment inflicted by vigilantes and mobs on often innocent victims, was far from an unusual occurrence, though some historians have depicted it as such. Instead, writes Philip Dray, lynching was part of a "systematized reign of terror that was used to maintain the power whites had over blacks." Drawing on records held at the Tuskegee Institute, Dray argues that from 1882 until 1952, not a single year passed without a recorded lynching somewhere in the United States, most often in the Deep South and Mississippi Delta regions. This violent "justice," meted out "at the hands of persons unknown" (with, therefore, no possibility of attaching guilt to the perpetrators, though, as Dray points out, such seemingly spontaneous events required organization and planning) held African American communities in terror and was one force behind the exodus of black southerners to the north in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dray's extraordinary study reveals a pattern of crime against humanity, one that, he writes, diminished gradually for various reasons, not least of them the work of reformers and ordinary citizens "who knew we were too good to be a nation of lynchers." --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
Winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
This extraordinary account of lynching in America, by acclaimed civil rights historian Philip Dray, shines a clear, bright light on American history’s darkest stain—illuminating its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. Philip Dray also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose and eradicate lynching, including Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W.E.B. Du Bois. If lynching is emblematic of what is worst about America, their fight may stand for what is best: the commitment to justice and fairness and the conviction that one individual’s sense of right can suffice to defy the gravest of wrongs. This landmark book follows the trajectory of both forces over American history—and makes lynching’s legacy belong to us all.
Customer Reviews:
A Very Difficult Book To Read But Essential!.......2007-02-15
This is history book in the purest sense of what a history book should be yet this book is much more than a history of American Violence against African Americans, it's a history of how civilization can be repressive and savage despite it's seemingly enlightened ideology. Philip Dray doesn't hold back in painful details of lynching, the dynamics and psychology behind the mob mentality, and how people actively seek to uphold an illusion of law and order from the bigoted vigilantes to the unsympathetic courts. Collectively we have tried and still continue to try to supress the history of slavery and the bloody history subsequent racial violence. This book needs to be required reading in our schools as a counter to other so-called history texts admonishing certain fathers of the nation.
One word - outstanding........2006-01-29
Quite possibly the best, most well-researched book I've ever read. A smooth read, impeccable use of historical sources, and a clear narrative account of the most tragic era in American history. For scholars who research or teach in the area of social control, legal, and extra-legal punishment, you *cannot* have a full grasp of the topic unless you read Dray's work. A fine work of history...the author is to be commended.
Very informative.......2005-10-05
This book was not only shipped within 2 days but in new condition. The book itself is very informative about other things than lynching. It talks about various people related to the anti-lynching movement tons of other things. I'm currently using this as a text book for a college class. This is a great teaching resource! Buy the book, you won't forget it!
A first rate history of an American tragedy.......2005-09-10
Dray's account, while often disturbing reading, is an essential for anyone who seeks to understand the lynching phenomenon in the United States. Scholarly, but accessible, the history's gruesome recountings of lynchings are balanced by the tales of those individuals and organizations that fought, often at great personal peril, to bring an end to this national disgrace. This meticulously researched volume is recommended for the professional as well as the lay historian. It is a cautionary tale, but ultimately one not without hope.
I only THOUGHT I knew about lynchings..........2005-07-16
I fancy myself a history buff. And as a black man, I like to think I know my history. I knew how savage whites in the South could be to black men who didn't know their place.
I knew what a potent and mix sex and race were - and are - in America.
But nothing I knew prepared me for what I read. Mr. Dray did an incredible job in tying together the long history of lynching in this country, from its origins in early America, to the 1960s - in other words *in my lifetime*.
I gained a appreciation for Ida Wells that I never had; she is often mentioned in Black History texts, but I never understood until "BPU" why she was so amazing.
This book should be required reading for high school students Nationwide (another fact that Dray makes clear is that while Southerners were the worst offenders, lynchings took place in the Northern states as well).
This shameful period of American History is as bad as the Nazis atrocities against Jews - and for a far longer period of time. People who think that post-slavery, Jim Crow was nothing more than a benign embarassment should be made to read this book until they get it.
Hats off to Phillip Dray for a engrossing and educational read. By the time I finished, I understood our country a little better than before.
Book Description
In 1485 the Portuguese Crown and Catholic Church began to kidnap Jewish children, forcibly convert the young conscripts, and ship them to São Tomé Island off the African equator to work the government sugar plantations. The collision of slavery, sugar agriculture, and discovery of The Americas transformed this island colony into the nidus of the wholesale black slave trade that infected Africa and Western commerce for the next 350 years. This is a unique and little-known chapter of the Diaspora which also reveals the Medieval Church's complicity in the business of slavery.
São Tomé tells the story of young Marcel Saulo and his sister Leah who were abducted with other children from their synagogue in Lisbon and shipped 4,000 miles to the West-African island.
Customer Reviews:
The road to hell began here.......2007-10-07
Sometime around the end of the 15th century, the Portuguese Inquisition began kidnapping Jewish children from their families and expatriating them to the remote island of Sao Tome off the African coast, where they were forcibly converted to Catholicism and sent to work as slaves on the sugar plantations. When the Western Hemisphere was split between Spain and Portugal with Spain receiving the lion's share of the spoils, the Portuguese realized that while Spain got most of the territory, Portugal could get rich from importing slaves to work the land. Sao Tome became one of the first jump-off points for the voyage through the middle passage, through which 25 million Africans were transported to the Americas on the slave ships.
Paul Cohn tells the story of Sao Tome through a young Portuguese Jew, Marcel Saulo, who is kidnapped and sent to the island at the age of 14, enduring the trials of semi-slavery, ultimately freeing himself and working his own sugar plantation with African servants of his own. How he runs afoul of the island regimes that insist that all blacks be subjugated to slavery while he treats his own servants as free men and women, and his problems with maintaining his Jewish identity and heritage while passing as a Catholic in order to survive the Inquisition, whose long arm reached even as far as Sao Tome, make up the backbone of the story.
Cohn is a gifted storyteller and he has written a page-turner that keeps you interested in the plot from beginning to end. The plot, and the historical background, are fascinating enough to overcome the book's one-dimensional characters and pedestrian writing. Cohn did manage to hold my interest enough to make me want to learn more about this period in history, which makes the book ultimately succeed as a historical novel.
Judy Lind
Memorable Historical Novel.......2007-10-02
Incredible and riveting, this story was a page turner from the beginning to the end. It contains characters you care about and is beautifully written. I loved it. Definitely memorable!!
Little Known History: The Beginning of Slavery.......2007-03-22
São Tomé is an inordinately readable novel based on fact, one of those discoveries that not only introduces a fine author but also reveals information known by all too few of us. In his Foreword author Paul D. Cohn reveals the source of his novel: the Saulo Chronicle was written between 1497 and 1500, the journal history of a young Jewish lad from Portugal who was kidnapped by the Catholic Church as part of the Inquisition and shipped to the West African Island of São Tomé where he endured hardships not only of separation from his family but also the filthy unhealthful living conditions as a slave on the sugar cane plantations and yet survived to witness (and fight against) the inception of the commerce of slavery spurred on by the discovery by his fellow countryman Christopher Columbus of the New World.
Cohn's writing technique is very straightforward and narratively complex while remaining riveting as story telling. His descriptions Marcel Saulo's two month ship journey from Portugal to Africa, the treatment of the Jewish children who were expected to convert to Catholicism once on the island (or be killed), and the gradual adaptation to live in a strange place whose indigenous problems included virulent malaria and typhoid fever in addition to the local wars occurring between separate parts of the island as well as rebellion as the African slaves were brought together to sell to slave traders - all elements that defy belief yet are convincingly recounted. How Saulo met and married a Jewish girl only to lose her to tragedy and subsequently bonded with other girls both Jewish and African and how he managed to maintain his Jewish soul while converting to the Catholic ways in order to survive, challenging in his own way the concept of slavery by treating his 'workers' as free men and women, and how he fought the changes in the island regimes and in Portugal's government of the island all make for a story that is a journey of courage and bravery and faith.
If the novel has a flaw it is in the need to edit the number of side stories that flood the pages. Characters arise and disappear so quickly that the reader needs to back reference to keep the flow of the novel in line. But that is a small dent in a novel that commands respect and enlightens the reader. This is an extraordinary accomplishment and pleads for a wide readership. Grady Harp, March 07
A Wonderful Historical Novel.......2006-04-13
Paul Cohn's Sao Tome is a beautifully written, thoroughly researched historical novel. The characters are engaging, the story is compelling, and the descriptions of life on Sao Tome are richly detailed. This book inspired me and moved me to tears. I loved it.
An excitingTale.......2006-02-10
Sao Tome is an exciting read. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Paul Cohn describes the harrowing experiences of a young
Portugese, Jewish boy who was kidnapped and sent to Sao Tome
Island during the Inquisition. The tale, based on historical records, recounts the fate of the children sent from Portugal and also tells the tale of the slaves imported from Africa
to work on the sugar plantations. It is written with sympathy
and shows the reader the unbelievable difficulty of life for those who were victims of the Inquisition and of slavery.
Average customer rating:
|
Bookmarks: Reading in Black and White
Karla F. C. Holloway
Manufacturer: Rutgers
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"BookMarks is a moving and revelatory memoir, as Holloway contemplates her own reading history as well as that of her family...this is a work of fiercely intelligent scholarship."-Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune
"Part memoir, part historical research on the reading habit of writers, Karla Holloway provides the reader with a rare opportunity to reflect upon his/her own reading experience: What have you read? How did you learn to read? Where were your 'protected and isolated spaces' for reading? How has that early experience shaped your current reading? A unique contribution to our understanding of the importance of reading in shaping our culture."-David S. Ferriero, Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of the Research Libraries, New York Public Library
What are you reading? What books have been important to you? Whether you are interviewing for a job, chatting with a friend or colleague, or making small talk, these questions arise almost unfailingly. Some of us have stock responses, which may or may not be a fiction of our own making. Others gauge their answers according to who is asking the question. Either way, the replies that we give are thoughtfully crafted to suggest the intelligence, worldliness, political agenda, or good humor that we are hoping to convey. We form our answers carefully because we know that our responses say a lot.
But what exactly do our answers say? In BookMarks, Karla FC Holloway explores the public side of reading, and specifically how books and booklists form a public image of African Americans. Revealing her own love of books and her quirky passion for their locations in libraries and on bookshelves, Holloway reflects on the ways that her parents guided her reading when she was young and her bittersweet memories of reading to her children. She takes us on a personal and candid journey that considers the histories of reading in children's rooms, prison libraries, and "Negro" libraries of the early twentieth century, and that finally reveals how her identity as a scholar, a parent, and an African American woman has been subject to judgments that public cultures make about race and our habits of reading.
Holloway is the first to call our attention to a remarkable trend of many prominent African American writers--including Maya Angelou, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates, Malcolm X, and Zora Neale Hurston. Their autobiographies and memoirs are consistently marked with booklists--records of their own habits of reading. She examines these lists, along with the trends of selection in Oprah Winfrey's popular book club, raising the questions: What does it mean for prominent African Americans to associate themselves with European learning and culture? How do books by black authors fare in the inevitable hierarchy of a booklist?
BookMarks provides a unique window into the ways that African Americans negotiate between black and white cultures. This compelling rumination on reading is a book that everyone should add to their personal collections and proudly carry "cover out."
Customer Reviews:
Insightful.......2007-01-29
I really enjoyed this work of Ms. Holloway. It was very insightful on many levels. I appreciated her opening my eyes to the role that books played in the lives of many well known Black intellectual artist--lacking a better description. I also felted it was somewhat cathartic, for Ms. Holloway, because of the very personal and tragic event to have taken place in her life. Thank you Ms. Holloway for sharing. Blessings to you. A very enlightening read.
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