Richly intelligent, hustling energy throughout.
Bedside companion, certainly not to be read all at once, of clips, stories, impressions, poems, and narratives that tell the history of black art that has enriched the globe, not just the States, and of the big fall into drugs and crime and urban blight. The more famous contributors include Alexander Hamilton, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Marcus Garvey, Duke Ellington (“Nights at the Cotton Club”), Langston Hughes, Adam Clayton Powell, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Gordon Parks Sr., Ann Petry (from 1946’s The Street), Sidney Poitier, Claude McKay, Piri Thomas, John Oliver Killens, James Baldwin (“Fifth Avenue Uptown: A Letter from Harlem” from Nobody Knows My Name), Ben E. King’s song “(There Is a Rose in) Spanish Harlem,” Malcolm X (from The Autobiography of Malcolm X), Maya Angelou (on Castro in Harlem), Chester Himes (from Cotton Comes to Harlem), and editor Boyd himself (Autobiography of a People, not reviewed; African and African-American history/College of New Rochelle). (Missing: Ralph Ellison, Melvin B. Tolson’s Harlem Gallery.) This is a book, Boyd says, that “stretches beyond the halcyon twenties into the world of the learned scholars, novelists, and ordinary ‘griots’ so that you can feel Harlem’s unique pulse, see those hues of humanity, smell the seductive aroma wafting from a thousand restaurants and street vendors or hear the countless tongues trying to talk above the music blasting from boom boxes and store speakers.” There are also charming excerpts from works by relative unknowns, such as Cintra Williams’s fierce deconstruction of “Chris Rock at the Apollo” and Michele Wallace’s “Memories of a Sixties Girlhood: The Harlem I Love” (from her Invisibility Blues), an antidote to Harlem on My Mind and Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets.
Richly intelligent, hustling energy throughout.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4681-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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