African-american: books tagged “african-american” @ BookFinder.com

ISBN 9780671922542 (0-671-92254-8, 0671922548)

via

Alice Walker

by Alice Walker

ISBN 0671922548 (0-671-92254-8)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

Find This Book

› Find signed collectible books: 'Alice Walker'

More editions of Alice Walker:

Alice Walker: ISBN 0671922548 (0-671-92254-8)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

ISBN 9781400033416 (1-4000-3341-1, 1400033411)

via

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

ISBN 1400033411 (1-4000-3341-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc

Find This Book

› Find signed collectible books: 'Beloved'

Book summary:

Toni Morrison gently reads her own Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the unabridged version of this riveting tale of ex-slave Sethe and the beloved ghost that haunts her. While Morrison makes occasional odd pauses in her reading, what is lost in smoothness is more than made up for in quiet intensity as the author reads words obviously deeply felt. Her intimate knowledge of the characters and their motivations lends this reading an authority that helps the listener sort out the breaks in time and dialogue in this complex story of a woman coming to terms with her enslaved past and the loss of her husband and baby daughter. (Running time: 12 hours, eight cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs [via]

More editions of Beloved:

ISBN 9780307278449 (0-307-27844-1, 0307278441)

via

Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison

ISBN 0307278441 (0-307-27844-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books

Find This Book

› Find signed collectible books: 'Bluest Eye'

Book summary:

Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.

Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.

There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.

This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus [via]

More editions of Bluest Eye:

The Color Purple

by Alice Walker

ISBN 1568496281 (1-56849-628-1)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

Find This Book

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Color Purple'

Book summary:

Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self. [via]

More editions of The Color Purple:

ISBN 9780808510574 (0-8085-1057-6, 0808510576)

via

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

by Maya Angelou

ISBN 0808510576 (0-8085-1057-6)
Hardcover, Bt Bound

Find This Book

› Find signed collectible books: 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'

Book summary:

In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant." [via]

More editions of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: ISBN 0808510576 (0-8085-1057-6)
Hardcover, Bt Bound

ISBN 9780791077689 (0-7910-7768-3, 0791077683)

via

I know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Blooms Guides)

by Harold Bloom

ISBN 0791077683 (0-7910-7768-3)
Softcover, Facts on File

Find This Book

› Find signed collectible books: 'I know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Blooms Guides)'

More editions of I know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Blooms Guides):

I know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Blooms Guides): ISBN 0791077683 (0-7910-7768-3)
Softcover, Facts on File

ISBN 9780679732761 (0-679-73276-4, 0679732764)

via

Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

ISBN 0679732764 (0-679-73276-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc

Find This Book

› Find signed collectible books: 'Invisible Man'

Book summary:

A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, The Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue, "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.

As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.

What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realises he's been duped into believing what hethought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that colour made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either colour or men".

Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, andsadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world isa tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak, Amazon.com [via]

More editions of Invisible Man:

ISBN 9780812035209 (0-8120-3520-8, 0812035208)

via

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

by Anthony S. Abbott, P. Ellison

ISBN 0812035208 (0-8120-3520-8)
Softcover, Barrons Educational Series Inc

Find This Book

› Find signed collectible books: 'Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man'

Book summary:

A guide to reading "Invisible Man" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list. [via]

More editions of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man:

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: ISBN 0812035208 (0-8120-3520-8)
Softcover, Barrons Educational Series Inc

ISBN 9780060838676 (0-06-083867-1, 0060838671)

via

Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Zora Neale Hurston, Gates, Henry Louis (AFT), Edwidge Danticat

ISBN 0060838671 (0-06-083867-1)
Softcover, Harpercollins

Find This Book

› Find signed collectible books: 'Their Eyes Were Watching God'

Book summary:

At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work.

Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either:

It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.

One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge is Janie Crawford, who has married three men and been tried for the murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to justify herself to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend, Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf."

Hurston's use of dialect enraged other African American writers such as Wright, who accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced by admiration for her depictions of black life, and especially the lives of black women. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and women, and allows them to speak in their own voices. --Alix Wilber [via]

More editions of Their Eyes Were Watching God:

ISBN 9780791051917 (0-7910-5191-9, 0791051919)

via

Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye

by Harold Bloom

ISBN 0791051919 (0-7910-5191-9)
Hardcover, Facts on File

Find This Book

› Find signed collectible books: 'Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye'

Book summary:

A child's descent into madness was explored in Eye.

The title, Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye, part of Chelsea House Publishers Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Toni Morrison, a chronology of the authors life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. [via]

More editions of Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye:

Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye: ISBN 0791051919 (0-7910-5191-9)
Hardcover, Facts on File

		Search \| About \| Preferences \| Interact \| Help

150 million books. 1 search engine.	Search Author, Title or ISBN

books tagged “african-american” (African American / african american)

books tagged “african-american”