Writin' Is Fightin': Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper - Hardcover

Reed, Ishmael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689119755 ISBN 13: 9780689119750

Publisher: Atheneum, 1988

Synopsis

A collection of editorials, book reviews, and essays by the noted and often controversial author features his views on "The Color Purple," a critique of "1984," and a study of the dramatist, August Wilson

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Novelist-playwright Reed's latest collection of essays and reviews lives up to its title. He laments Jesse Jackson's "Hymietown" remarks but measures it against racist slurs made by government officials. He pummels the "literary-industrial complex" for ignoring writing by nonwhites; argues that Orwell's 1984 could apply to capitalism as well as communism; and exposes underlying racist attitudes in the liberal press, on television newscasts, in city politics and schools. Sharp-edged satires condemn South Africa's Afrikaner regime and the Bernhard Goetz "subway vigilante" trial. Reed examines the incomprehension faced by Afro-American and African playwrights in the U.S. and discusses boxer Joe Louis, the film The Color Purple, Asian-American communities and why the Soviets allow Saint Nicholas to remain a symbol of Christmas. Solid, punchy and provocative, these 19 forceful essays represent a departure from the jazzy, rambling style of Reed's earlier books.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

In this collection of editorials, essays, and book reviews (some from The Nation and The New York Times ), Reed shows spritely style"Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs"and an admirably uncompromising stance toward monoculturalism, The Color Purple, illiteracy, the playwrights August Wilson and Wole Soyinka, the "American literary industrial complex," and white South Africa. There are two fine reviews on Joe Lewis and Chester Himes, men who suffered but fought "America's Color Bind." Writing is fighting for Reed, as it has to be, for as he suggests in his piece on George Orwell's cultural limitations, 1984 has been with us for 300 years. Peter Bricklebank, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atheneum
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0689119755
• ISBN 13: 9780689119750
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 226