Fiction Review: The Illustrated Man

At the end of January, I decided to read another book in the busy TBR library and got off to a great start with Back to the Classics Challenge 2022 , which I did not do very well last year ! I got Ray Bradbury 's The Illustrated Man , the book my husband gave me for my birthday last year. Ray and I will be back. When I was a teenager, I read all the books on my public library shelf! That was a long time ago, so over the past few years I've discovered why I love his books so much (check out my 2018 review of The Martian Chronicles ). This collection of stand-alone stories does not disappoint; He is attractive, intelligent and wise.

The man depicted in the title appears in the foreground and is the rest of the group. He was a tall, tattooed man who lived in the night. Each one tells a story with sound and animation, like a little movie playing on its cover. An enlightened man travels through the Wisconsin countryside and meets other men along the way. The two decide to camp together all night, and the other guys stay awake all night and watch in amazement as the tattooed man tells his story. These are the rest of the stories in this book, each truly unique. They are all science fiction, but, as Bradbury always does, most of them have to do with human nature. Many of them occur in the future, in outer space and / or on other planets. In The Other Foot , a community of blacks live peacefully on Mars when a missile arrives, destroying their peaceful community. Like many of Bradbury's stories, the tour here is witty and full of irony. The Long Rain contains a military group on Earth that finds it extremely difficult to adapt to life on Venus. In The Rocket Man , a typical Earthling family struggles with their father's time-consuming astronaut work while struggling to adjust to a normal life while at home for vacation. Earth missionaries will discover new life forms on Mars in The Fire Balloons (commonly if you read The Martian Chronicles ) that oppose attempts to introduce Christianity and perhaps teach priests something. The Last Night of the World presents a very simple concept that will have terrible consequences that will blow your mind. My favorite story is The Exiles , which is so witty that describing it will spoil the fun of surprises, but it has an important message.

These are just a few quick examples of the eighteen stories in this collection, but each one is fictional, mischievous and thoughtful. This book was published in 1948 and it is surprising to find that most of these stories were written in the 1940s (and possibly earlier) because their imaginative meanings are still relevant today. Although much of the science fiction literature of the day seems outdated today (e.g., the use of instant messaging at home with "IM" here in the story!), Bradbury wrote about racism, classicism, how people treat others, censorship, danger, and so on. . More today in a viable and relevant way. It may be disappointing not to move forward as the human race, but Bradbury enjoyed each of these stories so much that we happily discovered the truth hidden in the conversation and then followed his example. I really enjoyed each of these thought-provoking stories and look forward to the next episode on Bradbury's back cover.

281 pages, Simon & Schuster

Tantour's voice

This book is a challenge to read :

TBR Mountain Challenge

Back to the Classics Challenge 2022 - Collection of short stories

I'm taking part in the 2022 Alphabet Soup Challenge

Diversity Challenge

The World Book Challenge Journey - Are Mars and Venus Worth It?

Note: This post contains member links. If you buy through this link, I will get a small commission (cents per purchase) to make up for the time I spent writing this blog at no additional cost to you.

Visit my YouTube channel for more fun in books!

 

Listen to a sample audiobook here and / or download it from Audible. The example shows an introduction by Ray Bradbury (not included in my print edition) that explains why and how he wrote some of these interesting stories.

 

You can purchase books through Bookshop.org , helping the purchase at the independent bookstore (or all independent bookstores) of your choice; The convenience of online shopping when shopping locally!

Or you can order The Illustrated Man from Book Depository for free worldwide shipping.

 

It's Monday 2/14! What Are You Reading?

Organizer Book Date:

💜 HAPPY BIRTHDAY! 💜

I hope everyone had a great time watching last night's Super Bowl (or watching the commercials and eating like me) and having a great Valentine's Day today. I love all these little holidays and activities this time of year, as I explained in a recent video. Celebrate everyone, young and old.

Last night we made our favorite snacks from the Super Bowl and watched the game and commercials. Our son joined us for the first part and it was fun.

Lots of Super Bowl giveaways!

We used our new Buffalo Chicken Fryer.

Today I wore red, heart and ear socks. We give each other cards and candy on Valentine's Day, and my husband and I are celebrating tonight with food (and dessert) to take out to our favorite restaurant.

It was a very hard and full week. My 96-year-old stepfather returned to the hospital. At 4 am on Thursday we got a call from the nursing home that an ambulance was going to be called. I'll keep you posted on the details, but after a few days, the hospital doctors concluded that she was severely dehydrated. It was frustrating because we had already been talking to the nursing home staff for a month. We don't know yet if she went back to a nursing home or hospice. Whether he can eat and drink on his own, but the past few months have been very devastating to see him so weak and weak.

Last week I was able to upload two new videos to my YouTube channel .

• Celebrate all things young and old. Although this video was created for my chronic illness channel, I think this video was interesting for everyone. They found a few book bloggers/booksellers over the weekend and were just as excited to introduce themselves. See how we celebrate the little things that bring joy to our lives.
• Summary of January readings. I no longer post monthly book reviews here on my blog (it's part of my effort to simplify and streamline this year), but you can see all about January's reads in this video. Reading was a good month.

This is what we all read last week. I re-read Black History for Monther.

I finished reading Harlem Shuffle by Coulson Whitehead , a novel my husband gave me for Christmas, and I was so excited to read it. Set in the early 1960s, it follows a man named Ray Carney who set up a legitimate furniture business between his wife and children and wanted to earn extra money through crime like the rest of his family. It was wonderful and really brought the time, place and characters to life.

 

This weekend I was all set to start Octavia Butler's Kindred for an upcoming reading group...until I realized I thought it was n't on my Kindle. (It was another Butler novel.) So I needed something real before I could get a copy. I took Shannon Hitchcock 's bourgeois novel "Ruby Lee and I" off the shelf. Now I'm almost done and I really like it. It's a sweet story about 12-year-old Sarah, who seriously injures her little sister in a car accident that Sarah blames herself for. Sarah lives on her grandparents' farm while her sister is in the hospital and has always been best friends with Ruby, a black girl who lives next door. But the upcoming integration of the local school worries the whole town and comes between Sarah and Ruby. It is a warm and touching novel that honestly addresses serious issues.

I still hear Richard Wright's The Black Boy on tape, perfect for Black History Month, published in 1945. The author talks about Jim Crow childhood in rural south Mississippi, poverty, hunger, racism, abuse and fear. The audio is excellent and hearing the author's words in the first person is especially impressive and powerful.

My husband , Ken, has been enjoying a fun break with his favorite Jack Reacher series , reading the latest book Better Off Dead (#26) by Lee Child and Andrew Child, Brother Lee. I gave him this for Christmas (every year!) and he was ecstatic! He and I just started watching the new season of Reacher on Amazon Prime , and we're still enjoying it (one is a book and the other has never been read).

 

Ken is reading Countdown City by Ben Wintersen, the second book in the Last Cop series. I gave him the series last year and gave him this book for Christmas. The series follows Detective Hank Pallas, a dedicated police officer who always does his job despite the threat of disaster. In 77 days, an asteroid will hit Earth and end our world, but Hank investigates a missing person (now in a world where many people have disappeared). It is very good! He likes it.

 

Our 27-year-old son continues to read The Black Squad Chronicles by Glenn Cook, one of the books in the series of the same name. He says it's a series he's wanted to read for years and found it last year at an antique store in our town. He appreciates it!

Just an additional blog post from last month.

Art review. The Illustrated Man is an excellent collection of Ray Bradbury's creative, intelligent and engaging musings.

What You Read Monday is curated by Catherine for Book Day , so check out her blog and join in the Monday fun. You can also join the Kids/Teen/Boys version hosted by Unleashing Readers .

Follow me on Twitter @SueBookByBook or on Facebook on my blog page.

What are you and your family reading this week?

Movie Monday: Honey Boy

Sometimes I search the Rotten Tomatoes website, I look at the movie ratings on our broadcast channels. It's always frustrating when you see something that sounds good, and then you see if the critics' score was 30% and the audience's score was 20%. But recently, a film that was almost a perfect product for critics և viewers - Honey Boy , written by իա performer Shaya Labiouf (: called semi-autobiographical), caught my attention. We both enjoyed this entertainment: a gripping film about a dysfunctional childhood.

A young Noah Jupe ( A Quiet Place ) plays Otis, a twelve-year-old actor trying to get to Hollywood. She lives with her father, James, a former drunken rodeo clown played by an almost unknown Shia Labif. They both live in a dilapidated motel down the road, and their immediate neighbors are a group of young prostitutes. Otis supports them both, on whom both of his parents depend. James is one of the most ineffective dads you'll ever see on screen (which means something). The alternate scenes take place in the future when Otis, now 22 and starring Lucas Hedges, becomes a Hollywood action star living a life full of alcohol, drugs and women. One night, drunk driving, he had a terrible accident and was sent to a rehabilitation hospital. There, his therapist, played by the great Laura San Giacomo, tells him that he is showing all the symptoms of PTSD, even though he claims to have never been traumatized. Gradually, at the stage of recovery, he begins to open up, remember his childhood, appearing in alternative scenes for the public.

This is a powerful way to tell the story of a traumatic, difficult childhood, while at the same time talking about what happened in his childhood, about the impact of this childhood on adults. The film was nominated for numerous awards, most notably for the screenplay "Shia Labiouf", first directed by Alma Harel, for its extraordinary portrayal of young Noah Jupe as a child in dire need of parental love. - ից grows out of need. It's a powerful, touching film, but it's fun. As viewers mourn the loss of young Otis' childhood, we have reason to hope for a better future for Otis. One can only imagine that writing this film and then playing it in the father's version would be very emotional and therapeutic for Labiouf. It certainly offers a very raw, honest, powerful story.

Honey Boy is created by Amazon Studios and is available on Amazon Prime.

If, like me, you're curious to know more about Shia Labiouf's weird on-screen childhood and his feelings for his father, check out this amazing interview with Jimmy Kimmel.

Fiction Review: Mercy Street

I have been a fan of author Jennifer Hay for many years. I read the Baker Towers novel in the early 2000s, which was set in Cole, Pennsylvania in the 1940s, and I really liked it. I wondered if it was the “right time and place” situation, but a few years later I enjoyed re-reading it for a group of my books. In fact, it is enough to make the list of the top ten favorite novels of 2009! Then I read the lady . Kimble , another novel by Hey, about three different women, each married to a man, and I love this woman, too. In 2011 I read A Family Status with a Genetic Daughter for a group in my Hague book and the following year I read Faith , which happened during the Boston Parish book scandal. . So when I first saw Jennifer Hey publish a new novel on February 1st, I took the opportunity to see it. I've heard of Mercy Street on tape and found it as interesting and suspenseful as any O novel.

Mercy Street is a multi-service women's hospital in Boston, and the novel tells the story of several different characters whose lives intersect at different points, many of which relate to hospitals. Claudia is a woman in her forties and works as a specialist in the clinic. He grew up in poverty in the village of Maine, the only child of a mother who, like Claudia, lived in a trailer with dozens of foster children. Although her mother did two jobs, Claudia was the main caregiver of most of the children, even though she was very young. His experience has enabled him to understand the lives of many poor young clients. Anthony grew up in Boston and was injured as a young man while working on a construction site. Unable to deal with the ongoing traumatic brain injury, he lived in his mother’s basement. She spent all of her time attending a daily meeting at a nearby Catholic church and engaging in her anti-abortion efforts, which included protests on Mercy Street. Timmy grew up with Anthony and knew him since childhood. She now weeds herself and her son in Florida. Claudia and Anthony are both Timmy's clients and one day they meet at his apartment. Victor lives in a village in Pennsylvania, he is a racist and extremist and collects guns and food. His views on abortion were very different from Anthony's: he believed that women of color reproduced faster than whites, so any white woman who had an abortion should be ashamed and condemned. He met Anthony online and asked him to create a website with a "Hall of Shame" featuring pictures of women visiting health clinics on Mercy Street (although many women were there for other reasons). Anthony is involved for moral reasons, but Victor is clearly dangerous.

The novel tells each of these characters separately, in separate sections, because their lives subconsciously overlap and influence each other. I’ve thought a lot about why I liked Hay’s novels so much and what made them so interesting. Like The Streets of Mercy , he writes more about ordinary people living ordinary lives, but he is an incredibly talented writer in bringing these characters to life on the pages. At the end of the novel, you are very interested in Claudia, Anthony and Timmy (maybe not Victor!) And want to know what happened to them. Each of these characters is a lonely person, so this novel doesn’t focus on the same family as many previous novels, but you can learn about their family history and (limited) existing relationships through flashbacks and current stories. Hey writes from a variety of perspectives, giving readers an overview of her life, motivation and values. The audio book was read by a narrator but it worked well and I was deeply immersed in the story. Of course, like Iman , the novel is controversial, but it’s not about questions, it’s about people. This makes The Hague's novels easier to read and more interesting, I think: for those who feel completely real on the pages.

352 pages, echo

Harper Audio

You can watch / listen to an interview with Jennifer Haye about Mercy Street , written by Jess Walter and hosted by Parnassus Books (owned by Ann Pachett). He talks about the concept of the novel, the cover and how to get acquainted with the class topics of the novel.

This book is suitable for the following reading purposes :

Alphabet Soup Competition m

In the Massachusetts Literary Race

Visit my YouTube channel to get more book fun !

 

Listen to an audio sample of the beginning of the novel and part of Claudia here and / or download it from Audible.

 

You can find books through Bookshop.org , where your purchase supports the independent bookstore of your choice (or any independent bookstore) - the convenience of online shopping with the convenience of local shopping!

 

Or order Mercy Street from a bookstore with free worldwide shipping

Middle-Grade Review: Marshmallow and Jordan

Heard Great Things About Alina Chaw Middle Class Marshmallow Jordan Graphic Novel I finally got a chance to read it for myself. I loved this touching and enduring story of a young disabled girl who faces challenges and finds an impossible partner to support her.

Jordan was the captain and star of the Indonesia national basketball team. Then the accident led to him being put in a wheelchair. He seems amazingly consistent, his talented teammates always support him when behind training and playing, sometimes helping the coach during training or he can play from his chair. But Jordan cannot be an integral part of the team and the competition. One day, on his way home from school, he saw a wounded white elephant cub. I think elephants are popular in Indonesia because Jordan is not surprised, but helps the baby elephant back home so that its mother, a veterinarian, can help the injured animal. His parents agreed to let an elephant named Jordan Marshmallow stay with them until he regained his health. To recover his kindness, Marshmallow mysteriously builds a backyard pool one night, helping Jordan learn to swim the next day without using his feet. Jordan loves the newfound freedom of walking around the pool. After a great day of water basketball with his friends in the pool, Jordan joined the water polo team. As he's playing a brand new game, his teammates aren't very hospitable at first, fearing it could ruin his chances of reaching the final this year. Jordan seems to be falling behind his old and new teammates, but he trains hard every day after school, adding extra hours to himself, until his strength, stamina, and aquatic skills improve. At the end of the school year, the crisis resolves itself in a very surprising way.

For example, Jordan with his basketball team

For example, Jordan brings home Marshmallow candy

This person has a chronic disease, there were two young men who had the same disease at a very young age (one of them is being treated now) - I can say with confidence that having a disabled child is very rare. In a book for children and adolescents. A disabled child is less common for a gifted athlete. But this wonderful book is more than just a Jordanian flaw. It's all about the company, the family, and overcoming all kinds of challenges. I like that the challenges Jordan faces here have to do with his “disability, he can no longer play his favorite game,” and the completely “normal” kinds of challenges all the kids in the company face, accepting and trying something new. Learning Skills. There is a story in the story to make it more fun. Beautiful, colorful watercolor illustrations help tell the story - they literally paint a complete picture of Indonesia's daily life (add some additions to the section). Picture together և Text / Dialogue that tells the magical story of an ordinary girl from a different culture, familiar to most readers, with challenges that all children can identify with.

365 pages, first second

This book faces the following 2022 reading challenges :

TBR Mountain Challenge:

Diversity Challenges

Travel the world with books - Indonesia

inspiration. I got this book from the publisher for an honest review. My opinions do not affect my opinions հարաբերությունների My relationship with the publisher or author.

 

Note: This post contains approved links. Buying from these links gives me a small commission (one buyback per purchase) to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog at no additional cost to you.

 

 

Visit my YouTube channel for more book fun .

 

You can get the book through Bookshop.org , shopping supports your favorite independent bookstore (or all independent bookstores) at the convenience of online shopping when shopping locally.

 

Or you can order from Marshmallow և Jordan Book Depot , including free worldwide shipping.

 

It's Monday 2/21! What Are You Reading?

The book is posted by date

Hope everybody is well on Monday morning. Happy President's Day in the United States!

Same thing here plus ... my father-in-law came out of the hospital and back to the nursing home. He was often thought to be severely dehydrated and malnourished. When he returns, we fear he will go down that path again. My husband and I (and my son, when he’s here) go there every day, especially during meals, to encourage him to eat and drink more, but they still keep him on a pure diet, which is pretty bad! We have requested a staff meeting tomorrow to help employees better understand your needs. We want to get back to the original food, go back to PT and get out of bed little by little every day. It was very frustrating to watch this broadcast and also denied a lot of pain.

That's really what happens in our lives! Nowadays we are especially focused on taking care of her, meeting her and taking care of her as needed. My husband and son worked over the weekend to get all their belongings out of their apartment. Our house is now full of all his belongings, plus all our son's belongings and everything he has accumulated in the last 27 years!

I was able to upload a new video last week to update my weekly reading:

Friday reading 2-18-22

And I have another funny video that I will edit and upload this week.

Ah, I've done all the corrections for January. You can watch the summary video of my January reading , I’m talking about six books I read last month. Since I don't recap monthly blogs here, I thought I'd give you a brief overview of how I came up with my reading challenges last month:

Mount TBR Challenge - Only 2 out of 6 were on my shelves, I should start playing!

The Motivational Challenge for January was new to you and you read Genesville by new writer Amy Goldstein.

Back to Classic 2022 - I started with Classic in January! It is told in Ray Bradbury's classic short story The Illustrated Man .

Alphabet Challenge - You've completed all the unique letters B, H, I, J, M and S!

Factual Readers Challenge: The new year begins with two non-fiction books in science and economics.

Diversity Challenge - Good start! Five of my six books were miscellaneous.

Travel the world in books - I've been to India, Ghana, the UK and ... Mars and Venus!

Literary Escape Challenge - I have 3 women: Maryland, Massachusetts and Minnesota, plus Wisconsin.

This is what we all read last week. Focus on Black History Month:

I quickly read Shannon Hitchcock’s Ruby Lee and Me, a middle-class novel that I totally enjoyed. It’s a sweet story about 12-year-old Sarah whose younger sister was seriously injured in a car accident for which Sarah blames herself. Sarah is on her grandparents' farm while her sister is in the hospital. He was always best friends with Ruby, the black girl next door. But the upcoming local school merger has worried the whole city, and so has Sarah and Robbie. The novel is warm and moving, with some serious content that it deals with honestly; It's nice in every way.

 

I finally read Octavia Butler's Kindred book. Opa. You totally amazed me !! Dana, a 26-year-old black woman from California in 1976, suddenly and unexpectedly found herself in a slave garden in North Carolina in 1815. She is on the bank of the river and sees a boy drowning, so she goes swimming to save him, giving him a verbal break to revive him on the beach, before seeing his mother and starting the journey. . Understand what he is doing. At one point, Dana returns in 1976, wet, muddy and shivering, describing what happened to her white husband Kevin. Dana is brought to the factory several times to save her son Rufus, but sometimes her stay is prolonged, lasting eight months. Living the life of a slave on a farm through the story of Dana is moving, powerful and sometimes destructive. I took care of all the characters and I read them very late every night. I put this book down, why did you wait so long to read it?

 

Finally, I finished an audiobook that perfectly matched Richard Wright's Black History, a memoir first published in 1945. The author Jim Crowe talks about childhood, poverty, hunger, racism, abuse and fear in rural southern Mississippi. The second part, after going to Chicago and going to communism, was not a very good one for me, but it is interesting. The word is nice, and listening to the author in the first person is particularly suggestive and powerful. I have to choose my next word!

My husband, Ken, has just finished reading Ben Winters' City Countdown , the second book in The Last Cop movie . I started this series last year and gave this book as a Christmas gift. The series revolves around Detective Hank Ballas, a dedicated police officer who continues his work in the face of disaster. In 77 days, an asteroid will hit Earth and end our Earth, but Hank is investigating the disappearance of a man (in a world where many people are now disappearing). Very good! She really liked this series, and I would love to read it too.

 

Our son (27) is still reading Glenn Cook's Chronicles of the Black Company , a book in the series of the same name. He says it’s a series he wanted to read year after year and saw it last year at our local Thrift store. When he went there a few weeks ago, he explained to me that this book already contains the first book in the series, so it’s a scam!

 

Last week's blog post:

Monday: Honey Boy - a critically acclaimed, entertaining and ongoing performance by a child actress, based on the writings and performances of Shia Lebiu and her life.

Fiction Review: Jennifer High's Mercy Street People's Life revolves around a women's clinic, one of my favorite authors.

Mid-Level Review: Marshmallow and Jordan by Alina Chow - a graphic novel about a disabled middle-class girl with beautiful watercolor images that enliven the Indonesian page.

What I read on Monday was mentioned by Katherine on the book date, so check out her blog and join in the fun on Monday! You can also participate in the Child / Teen / YA version of Unleashing Readers.

Follow me on Twitter @SueBookByBook or on my Facebook page.

What are you and your family reading this week?

 

Fiction Review: Harlem Shuffle

When I decided to read it for Black History Month, the first book I chose was Colson Whitehead’s “ Harlem Shuffle ,” a Christmas present for my husband. The Whitehead Underground (my opinion in the link) surprised me, and I couldn’t wait to read its latest version, which takes place in Harlem in the early 1960s.

Ray Carney has come a long way after a difficult childhood with a notorious alcoholic father and criminal. Ray runs a decent business, a furniture store on 125th Street in Harlem, with his name on display in gold letters, and is married to Elizabeth, whose parents live under the pseudonym Striver’s Row. Ray and his apartment look like the subway, but Ray dreams of a nice apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the park. In 1959, their daughter Mae was born, and Elizabeth was pregnant with her second child. Ray’s business is going pretty well, but he feels constant pressure to pay all the bills, keep the business in the dark, so many people pay membership fees and want a better life for Elizabeth and her children. He grew up the brother of his brother Freddie, as his father often left him for a long time and remained with his aunt. He and Freddie are still close, although Freddie followed in Ray’s father’s footsteps and lived as a criminal. However, these are mostly small items, and when he occasionally offers Ray to sell “used TVs” at his store, Ray allows him to add them to legitimate used stocks and looks the other way. However, this time Freddie falls in love with the evil villains and attracts Ray, who offers his services as a barrier. The plans are to rob a luxury hotel in Harlem, and, as usual, the robbery is not going as planned. Everything happens, and Ray suddenly gets on the police radar and gets nervous because of a new criminal client ... but he makes more money. As he progresses, Ray rises in the world when he finds more and more problems in his beloved cousin. Ray is constantly moving between legal and criminal business, one foot in every world.

As always, Whitehead has a tremendous talent for attracting people to the site, place and time. In this case, the Harlem of the 1960s is so vivid and realistic that one can almost hear the sounds, smells, and fear and rage of racial riots. It penetrates all aspects of the scene and time, making you feel almost at home, and at the same time offers criminals and future black Harlem entrepreneurs (who are sometimes equally perverted). Ray is a complex and intriguing character who is trapped between two worlds, wanting to win the road in the real world and wanting to prove that he has nothing to do with his father, because he is attracted to such an attractive world of underground criminals. potential. This novel is successful on many levels: as a family drama, as a thrilling crime thriller, as a historical tale of an era of open racial conflict and a love letter to Harlem. I really enjoyed making this trip with Ray and his family.

318 pages, Double Day

This book addresses the challenges of reading in 2022 :

Pass the TBR call

Diversity Challenge (and February Mini Challenge - black)

New York (probably the first of many!) In the Literary Escape Challenge

Note: This post contains links to participants. Shopping on these links brings me a small commission (a few cents per purchase) to make up for the time I spend writing this blog at no extra cost to you.

 

Visit my YouTube channel to get more interesting books!

 

Listen to the audiobook here with a good story by Dion Graham and / or download it from Audible. This novel sounds great in sound!

 

You can purchase the book through Bookshop.org , where your purchases will be the choice for your independent bookstore (or all independent bookstores): shop online and shop locally!

Or you can order a Harlem Shuffle at the bookstore with free shipping worldwide.

Memoir Review: Black Boy

When I decided to focus my February reading on Black History Month, I went through a lot of audio books and found it very convenient. Richard Wright's Black Channel, originally published in 1945, is a reminder of a boy's difficult childhood and youth in rural Mississippi and his adult life in Chicago in the first half of the 20th century. The life of a young man in a constant struggle and the author is a compelling, compelling (and sometimes scary) story with a lot of interest in himself, family and other people of color.

Richard begins his memories of his four-year-old son, Nachz, Mississippi, living with his parents and brother. Shortly thereafter, his mother began a relentless struggle to care for her young children and support them financially. Ricardi studies a lot, but once the opportunity arises, he tries to make money to help his family, initially by doing work and doing odd jobs, even in a local bar to get customers a coin or nickel from books. . (And he drank his first drink as a child). To help the family he dropped out of eighth grade. They move to earn a living, sometimes moving with their families or occasionally living in small, dilapidated apartments. Richard's grandfather had a nice house and lived there for a while, but it was very religious with very strong ideas of how Richard should be, and in that life he did not feel comfortable with Richard and his mother ( although they had to were patient for a while). As he grew and began to read more and learn more about the world around him, Richard began to notice the stark contrast between blacks and whites in the South. As an intelligent and educated young man, he could not understand why things were happening and why people tolerated such disgusting treatment. Eventually, Richard escaped to North Chicago and was able to transfer his mother and brother there, although life was not easy. Richard was surprised to find that whites (usually Jews or other foreigners) treated him with kindness and justice, even though the majority of the population was anti-apartheid, even in the northern highlands. He withdrew from the Communist Party for his speech on equality and the presence of other educated blacks, but he was quickly upset by their quarrels and other issues.

Richard's life story is fascinating, both with its extraordinary age and with a fascinating look at Jim Crow South and the experiences of blacks in the early 1900s. Originally published in 1945, the narrator is not actually an author, but Peter Francis James has done an amazing job of fully capturing the voice of the child and the person, so you feel like telling the story directly ( audio example here ). While the discrimination and abuse he faces in Richard and his family is often disturbing, there are also funny moments when Richard remembers his childhood flourishing. The first half of the book, set in Mississippi, was a little more interesting to me than the subsequent episodes of Richard's involvement with communism, but I was still immersed in his powerful and compelling story from beginning to end.

Old classic

Harper Audio

This book is suitable for the following 2022 reading activities:

Back to Classics Probationary non-fiction classics

Non-fiction test (# 3) - in the social history category.

Diversity test

Call for Literary Travel - Mississippi

Publication I received this book from the publisher for an honest review. My review is my opinion and does not depend on my relationship with the publisher or author.

 

Advertising. This post contains accompanying links. Purchasing these links cost me a small commission (a penny to buy) to make up for the time I spent writing posts for this blog at no extra cost.

 

Visit the YouTube channel for more book fun !

 

Listen to a beautifully read and / or audio recording of Richard Francis James as an early child from an audio book .

 

You can buy a book through Bookshop.org , your purchase supports the independent bookstore of your choice (or all independent bookstores): Ease of buying online, but buy on the spot anyway!

Or you can order Black Boy from a Free International Shipping bookstore .