Agreeably shocking, sharply perceptive, quite funny.
Hip-hop culture gets both glorified and sent up, sometimes in the same sentence, in a debut collection by essayist and Rolling Stone contributing editor Touré.
Cruising between real New York and mythical Soul City, riffing on real stuff and craziness, Touré takes on bogus preachers, television, Black Panthers, Black American princesses, white idiocy, dreams of glory, prep schools, ebonics, clubs, cutting-edge chic, and hundreds of other bits and pieces of contemporary urban life and death in 24 mostly fast-moving pieces—pieces that are usually stories but sometimes just wild long lists. Perhaps writing about ghetto fabulousness demands excess, and most of the time it works. Opening with the lovely Steviewondermobile, Touré follows Huggy Bear Jackson as he smooths through downtown Soul City in his 1983 Cadillac Custom Supreme convertible with its $25,000 Harmon Kardon sound system, followed by his posse of four in their own cars, filling the air with Stevie Wonder. The superpowerful electronics of the sound system are more than the aged car can take, and the show grinds to a halt regularly until a fresh battery can take over. Huggy Bear is just one part of the parade that fills Freedom Avenue, taking music to the streets, but he’s a star. As is the Right Revren Daddy Love, pastor of the Church of Kentucky Fried Souls, oversized, oversexed and, when he starts flying, over the congregation. Equally stellar is the Black Widow, a DJ and black power queen who started off as just another Park Avenue preppie. William Safire disciples will revel in Afrolexicology Today’s Bi-Annual List of the Top 50 Words in African-America, and hipsters-in-training will find help in Blackmanwalkin and The African-American Aesthetics Hall of Fame, or 101 Elements of Blackness (Things That’ll Make You Say : Yes! That There’s Some Really Black Shit!). Progressive English teachers are sure to get mileage out of the thematic linkage provided by Satan, who shows up in various disguises.
Agreeably shocking, sharply perceptive, quite funny.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-66643-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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