Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century - Softcover

Kenan, Randall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316911127 ISBN 13: 9780316911122

Publisher: Little, Brown & Co., 1999

Synopsis

"A meaningful panoramic view of what it means to be human...Cause for celebration." --Times-Picayune

From the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Let the Dead Bury Their Dead comes a moving, cliché-shattering group portrait of African Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century.

In a hypnotic blend of oral history and travel writing, Randall Kenan sets out to answer a question that has has long fascinated him: What does it mean to be black in America today? To find the answers, Kenan traveled America--from Alaska to Louisiana, from Maine to Las Vegas--over the course of six years, interviewing nearly two hundred African Americans from every conceivable walk of life. We meet a Republican congressman and an AIDS activist; a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah and an ambitious public-relations major in North Dakota; militant activists in Atlanta and movie folks in Los Angeles. The result is a marvellously sharp, full picture of contemporary African American lives and experiences.

About this title

Review:

This delicious and diverse sampler of African American life culled from over 200 interviews by author Randall Kenan shows that the American idea of "blackness" is as vast as the United States itself and cannot be pinned down to simplistic sociological clichés. "More than a book of analysis," Kenan writes, "this is my book of soul searching. I am asking who we are." Crisscrossing North America, he visits some familiar settings--Oakland, New Orleans, and New York--and some unusual places (including Bangor, Maine, and Maidstone, Saskatchewan) to discover how everyday black folks deal with issues of race, identity, and nationality. From a black minister in Mormon Utah to a female judge in skinhead country to the state of blacks in the would-be utopia of Seattle, Kenan paints a revealing portrait of a people whose presence and perseverance may forge a better America in the 21st century. --Eugene Holley Jr.

From the Publisher:

"In his refusal to claim any special insight into the private dimensions of negritude, with his willingness to grant all of us our human complexities, and through his generosity of spirit that is accepting and understanding of our common frailties, Randall Kenan has fashioned a book that puts aside the "blacker than thou" sectarian arguments of yesterday and studies African-Americans as they live at the end of the century in vagriegated social, economic and political situations. In lonely New England or on Chicago's teeming South Side, he takes the temperature of 'the race,' and tells the complicated truth as he finds it, good news or bad. I salute his compassion and honesty, and am grateful for his ambition, the reach of it and the grasp."
--Anthony Walton

"Here is the best of the documentary tradition--its narrative possibilities realized wonderfully, suggestively by a talented wrtier of fiction who uses his storytelling skills to present a range of Americans to the rest of us, their fellow citizens."
--Robert Coles

"Somehow Randall Kenan has managed the impossible: weaving ethnography and poetry into a wonderful narrative about what it means to be black at the end of the century. Walking on Water astutely comprehends the complexity and beautiful contrdictions in the contour of black life. Reading Walking on Water is an extraordinary sojourn."
--Manning Marable, Professor of History, Director, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University

"[This book] pulsates with the multilayered rhythms of an epic . . . A lush tapestry of place, people, and personal reflection that is much more than the sum of its parts . . . Kenan's masterwork is a panoramic document of African-American life at the end of the 20th century. It is also a labor of love and a majestic offering to the future."
--Salim Muwakkil, Chicago Tribune

"A work of insight and compassion . . . What makes Walking on Waterso unusual is Kenan's willingness to look beyond the usual places, places not exactly known for the density of their black population, like Bangor, ME, and Grand Forks, ND."
--Alan Wolfe, The New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown & Co.
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0316911127
• ISBN 13: 9780316911122
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1