Another Day At The Front - Hardcover

Reed, Ishmael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 046506891X ISBN 13: 9780465068913

Publisher: Basic Books, 2002

Synopsis

African Americans have been at war with certain elements of the white population from the very beginning. Being black in this hemisphere is a battle, and each day is one spent at the front. In this new collection of essays, his first since Airing Dirty Laundry (1993), Ishmael Reed explores the many forms that this homefront war has taken. His brilliant social criticism feints deftly among past and present, government and media, personal and political. From the author whose essay style has been compared to the punching power of boxers Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali, this book is a series of fast, powerful jabs at America's long tradition of racism."Reed wears the mantle of Baldwin and Ellison like a high-powered Flip Wilson in drag."--Baltimore Sun"Ishmael Reed is a genius."--Terry McMillan"The sweep of his work has both grandeur and genius, and even when you disagree with him, he has you laughing, often at yourself. His always-provocative writing has humanity, humor, power, and vision. A true original."--Jill Nelson

About this title

About the Author

Ishmael Reed has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, and has long been on the faculty at U.C. Berkeley. Reed is the award-winning author of more than twenty books--novels, essays, plays, and poetry--that have been translated into seven languages. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was twice nominated for the National Book Award. He lives in Oakland, California.

Reviews

Despite the rabble-rousing subtitle, remarkable novelist and critic Reed offers far more than the erudite, colloquial confrontationalism with which he is often pigeon-holed. Essays sometimes focus on the virtues of crucial cultural figures, like Quincy Troupe, or contest divisive works by black intellectuals, such as Nigger. But the book, communicative and direct, remains at every turn acerbically fixed on peeling back everything that continues, extends or disguises the various forms of white-on-black violence, which remains, for the insightful and uncompromising Reed, a fundamental fact of the black experience in the United States.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Returning to the essay form for the first time since Airing Dirty Laundry in 1993, poet Reed gathers a series of original and revamped essays from recent years on a variety of topics, from the Confederate flag to NPR, with the underlying theme that African Americans have been living in a police state for the past 300 years. These brief essays, written in Reed's lively hit-and-run style, are certainly provocative, particularly as he jabs at many well-known critics both black and white, including George Will, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Mona Charen. With such wide coverage, every reader is likely to find something here to disagree with, but Reed consistently supports his arguments. A welcome addition to the corpus of African American collected opinion pieces, including Shelby Steele's A Dream Deferred and Cornel West's Race Matters. Recommended for all academic and public libraries.
Anthony J. Adam, Prairie View A&M Univ., TX
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reed, an essayist and novelist who is quite iconoclastic and closely identified with progressive movements, offers a remarkable work on race in America. This series of essays provides historical context to contemporary realities, sparing no one in his sharp criticism in the affairs of race. From the critics of Booker T. Washington to John C. Calhoun, a U.S. vice-president and apologist for slavery, and some of his contemporary spiritual brethren, Reed exposes their innards--stench and all. Despite Reed's progressive political tag, he gives no pass to feminists, particularly Susan Brownmiller, who inferentially justifies the lynching of black teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi in the 1950s for whistling at a white woman, while overlooking similarly misogynistic actions and attitudes by white men, for example tennis player John McEnroe. Reed also takes on the new black conservatives, in their blame-the-victim logic that tends to ignore other causes of black underachievement. Reed is an exceptional cultural critic, seeing America's flaws and daring it to reach its full potential. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 046506891X
• ISBN 13: 9780465068913
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240