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THE TONI MORRISON BOOK CLUB

Intimate responses to fiction cohere into a moving meditation on race.

Toni Morrison’s novels elicit powerful feelings of fear, grief, and anger.

Friends and colleagues at the College of New Jersey, Bennett (Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts, 2014, etc.), Brown-Glaude (Higglers in Kingston: Women’s Informal Work in Jamaica, 2011, etc.), Jackson (Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body, 2010, etc.), and Williams (co-editor: Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, 2012) gathered informally for several years to discuss the novels of the iconic Nobel laureate: “Morrison is our griot, a singer and social commentator, the keeper of traditions and the exemplary engaged citizen of our world.” Black and white, three women and one man, all parents anxious about their children’s futures, they discovered that Morrison’s works spoke to each of them directly, helping them to understand what it means to be black in America and to “live whole in times of uncertainty.” To structure the conversations conveyed in this insightful group memoir, they agreed to focus on four novels—The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and A Mercy—assigning each to two writers to show how the same novel affects different readers. Besides offering close, fresh readings of Morrison’s narratives, the authors share personal stories about the experiences that have shaped them as readers. Bennett, for example, grew up knowing he was an anomaly in his racist military and law enforcement family. Reading Song of Solomon, he writes, gave him a “feeling of floating outside myself” that allowed him “to feel comfortable as an outsider.” Jackson, writing about Beloved, and Brown-Glaude, about Song of Solomon, reveal their fears as mothers, consumed by worry about how to keep a child safe in a world where so many unarmed young black people have been killed by police. “My fear is borne out of the unpredictability of those deaths,” Brown-Glaude writes. “And my fear, at times, turns to anger toward those mothers of white sons who do not have to live this way.”

Intimate responses to fiction cohere into a moving meditation on race.

Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-299-32494-0

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin

Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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