“Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything?" I loved how defiant and questioning the narrator was. Also, there were no lulls in the story, it was concise. Cornel...
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coming to wright as an adult, i was stunned by the powerful combination of his words and james' voice to listen to this book is to be given a rare opportunity to truly appreciate the pain of another person, and to appereciate their life experiences some may be dismissive today of the relative lack of black achievement in american society when they say 'hey, slavery ended in 1865. get your act together already!' but by...
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Several years ago, I was assigned the first half of this book in an American History class. I sat down expecting it to be only mildly interesting, but by the end of the first chapter I was hooked. I read the whole thing straight through, from cover to cover, in about sixteen hours, furiously scribbling notes on every page. The narrative itself is vivid and compelling, and the style, structure, and ideas in Wright's autobiography...
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When I first picked up this book all I thought was just another reading assignment. However, Black Boy by Richard Wright affected me in ways no book ever has. This book is a touching autobiography describing the life of a young African American boy who struggles to find himself in such a prejudice society. He overcomes obstacles of religious, racial, and cultural segregation in the 20th century United States. During Richard's...
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In my quest to either reread or read the first time some of the timeless classics by African American writers this year, I tried to avoid reading this one. I just wasn't up to reading about another downtrodden, poverty-stricken, living in the ghetto story. But it is more than that. This masterpiece is a commentary on a way of life in the early part of the 1900s, a life that many African Americans endured and survived coming...
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