Toni Morrison Books

I don't encounter color photography very often that literally knocks me off my feet. But,this is a notable exception. The portraits in this book are glorious - a tribute to the profound sensitivity of the photographer who took them. This book is a must for any serious collection.

These are images that go beyond being visually powerful, they also have a profound spiritual, emotional and intellectual meaning. Toni Morrison's provocative meditation, "The Fisherwoman", is an integral part of this great work of art and provides a perfect entree into a gallery of sacred beauty.

I am much more of a devotee of black and white images than color - especially portrait photography. But, this incredible display of artistry sweeps me off my feet! The artistic depth and personal sensitivity displayed through this work makes me want to know more and see more from the master photographer who created it. You won't be disappointed with this purchase!

This superb book is nearly uncategorizable. The portraits contained in this volume, described as "color pictures of everyday people" taken with "a simple 35-mm camera, amateur film, no tripod, and no special lighting" are unlike any other photographs ever published. On a technical level, Robert Bergman's work equals the best of any of photographer now working (including any of a number of celebrity lensmen) while his painterly use of color, texture, and composition is unrivaled. This in itself would be enough for most photographers: in sensual terms there's much to startle and delight the eye. But for Bergman, the revelation of the inner life of the subject reigns supreme, and his masterly technique is entirely in the service of his manifest sympathy for each person whom he presents to us. It's here that these images depart so markedly from what we are used to seeing in a photograph of a person--each individual is revealed with the most penetrating gaze, but with such tenderness of spirit as to leave his or her human dignity unsullied. It's not photography, it's art. As Toni Morrison concludes in her Introduction, "Occasionally there arises an event or moment that one knows immediately will forever mark a place in the history of artistic endeavor. Robert Bergman's portraits represent such a moment, such an event."

Let me say that being able to hold this treasure in my hands and to feel the souls of both the artist and those within, provides an experience I never thought I would have. This book is a road map to the soul of all of us and it is my wish for everyone who is fortunate enough to see it that the door to the inner self that shines from Bergman's work is opened to them. It is a rich feeling indeed to be able to open the book at any point and see the face and love of God. Bergman is blessed with a vision that has brought this to Everyman. A KIND OF RAPTURE is a great and universal gift.

Justine Tally's "Paradise" Reconsidered: Toni Morrison's (Hi)stories and Truths is the first monograph exclusively devoted to Morrison's most recent novel, Paradise. The reader finds a comprehensive and thoughtful discussion of history in Paradise, history of Paradise, history and Paradise, and the book concludes with an examination of Paradise in the context of Morrison's other prose works. A contribution to the Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies, a new scholarly series produced in collaboration with the international Collegium for African American Research, this concise book impressively combines close reading with a thoughtful examination of the role of memory in historical fiction and with pressing questions on isues of race and gender.

Paradise Reconsidered is an elegantly written and tightly argued analysis of concepts of history, memory and narrative in Toni Morrison's Paradise. This will be an invaluable teaching resource for those of us who have included Paradise in our course lists, given not only Tally's knowledge of the field of African-American literature but also her ability to discuss complex concepts in lucid intelligible language.

Justine Tally's brief and insightful study of Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998) is provocative and multi-dimensional. It usefully situates the novel in relation to Morrison's oeuvre especially to Jazz (1992) and Beloved (1987) the two earlier novels in her trilogy about post-emancipation African American culture and society and to Morrison's own critical writing which suffuses her discussion. This makes the book as much a summary of where Morrison has taken us to at century's end as a specific critique of her latest novel. There is a welcome use of Morrison scholarship from Europe, too often ignored by Morrisonians in America, although there are some surprising Stateside ommissions. Philip Price's wonderful Dangerous Freedom (1997) is not cited and Jill Matus's Toni Morrison (1998) with its interesting work on trauma which could have illuminated aspects of the discussion here is ignored (too late to use?). Meanwhile, Linden Peach's rather derivative discussions - in Toni Morrison (1995) - are afforded too much space. As would be expected considering the novel's recent provenance, there is much use of newspaper and magazine reviews that Tally skilfully uses to show the often narrow nature of their concern with Morrison and their inability to deal with the complexity of a difficult novel. Tally astutely foregrounds "History" in its numerous guises as key to a discussion of Paradise giving the reader useful contextualisation and yet showing the limitations of a traditional literary historical approach to such a demanding postmodern novel. Most interestingly she discusses how important arguments about essentialism are to understanding this novel, making what is often an arcane discussion, clearcut and stimulating. Morrison is often accused of being difficult, Tally's clearly written and sensitively argued monograph supplies some dynamic answers to these postmodern puzzles.

Justine Tally's richly textured analysis of Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998) offers to both specialists in literary studies and scholars from other disciplines a clear and highly insightful introduction to that most complicated of Morrison's texts. Paradise Reconsidered: Toni Morrison's (Hi)stories and Truths places the novel within the larger context of Morrison's concerns with language and narrative strategy as well her wide reading in African American history and lore. Indeed, as Tally makes clear, Paradise constitutes the final part of a trilogy: "Whereas Beloved [1987] focuses on the role of memory, and Jazz [1991] is centered around the development of story, Paradise is devoted to the cultural production of History/history and its unstable relationship to both memory and story." (p. 14)

Tally's impressive survey of text and context provides a brief but illuminating account of the publishing history of the Morrison trilogy. Additionally, it looks at the novels in light of the author's literary, social and cultural criticism, especially Morrison's challenge to the what has been considered canonical in U. S. literature found in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). The analysis of the text itself elaborates on themes presented by other literary theorists. Tally draws upon theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Walter Ong, and at the same time addresses the questions raised by African American scholars such as Trudier Harris and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. But it is her own reading of the text and its meanings that stand out. She qualifies, or modifies, the notion of "magic realism," using Morrison's own objections as well as her own understanding of the theme and ultimately offers the phrase "psychic realism" as a more precise alternative. Tally goes through the vast number of characters in Paradise and nicely unravels the complicated web of relationships, plot turns, and narrative strategies that make Morrison's text difficult as well as exciting. Tally also gives us clues about some matters that Morrison leaves ambiguous or unexplained. Who among the occupants in the convent was the lone white girl? How do we understand the 'reappearances' of characters that we had thought were killed?

Tally highlights issues of gender and color in Morrison's texts, carefully assessing Paradise from its key first sentence, "They shoot the white girl first," through the layered stories of the women in the Convent and the population of Ruby, Oklahoma. The founding of the town by "8-rock" black families(the reference is to a mining term and the color of coal) is central to the text, but so is the subtly changing historical interpretation of the town's origins, as perceived by various newcomers. In attending to changing beliefs across generations, from the Reconstruction era to the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Tally also provides a chronological guide--as Morrison seems to do--to shifting modes of race-consciousness among African Americans. This is accomplished both through minute readings of the text and through expansive sections, such as those concerning Religious Ideology as Narrative Strategy and the meanings of feminism and racial "essentialism" in Morrison's novels.

The interdisciplinary nature of Tally's examination of Morrison sets it apart from many other readings. Tally surveys the literary aspects of Paradise with precision, but she also sees Morrison's writing as part of a larger pattern of African American culture and consciousness. The black Exodus to Oklahoma and other places in the 1880s already has its historians. But how Morrison has rendered these "matters of fact," and how Tally discusses history and memory and storytelling add richness to the other accounts. Tally writes with enormous insight. Other scholars will need to read her appraisals in order to advance their own interpretations of Morrison's cultural contributions.

Patrick B. Miller Department of History Northeastern Illinois University Chicago, Illinois

Remember, the journey to school integration is both a powerful and beautiful book and a strong reminder of how fresh (should I say present?) discrimination is, and also how the determination and strength to face violence and incomprehension can overcome deep prejudices.
Toni Morrison, (whom I thank every day for opening for me a window into de black world and way of thinking) with her fluent, elegant and sober writing, leads us to remember a time of struggle and advancement into an equal society, which is a goal we are still far from attaining.
This is a book to see, read and keep near at hand in order to be able to keep watch against prejudice and lack of tolerance. We can strive for a better and more just social world.
Javier Olmedo
Mexico City, Mexico

On May 17, 1954 the US Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional, sending the nation on a path of integration whose ramifications are being felt today. In Remember: The Journey To School Integration, author Toni Morrison presents archival photos depicting the events surrounding school integration processes, accompanying photos with a fictional text recounting the dialogue and emotions of students of the times. A fitting tribute to a volatile period in history which should never be forgotten.

When I was younger I used to love going to antique stores to buy old photographs. Usually these stores would have huge bins of old shots of families, individuals, and places. Finding the ones I thought were the most original, I bought them and gave each one its own name and history, entirely of my own making. I could pore over a single photograph for hours, enlivening it with a background that I myself would never be able to prove or disprove. But each photo was a staged affair. Its participants knew that they were being photographed. How different it would be to do the same thing, only with photos that highlighted a particular historical moment in our nation's history. In "Remember: The Journey To School Integration", authorial god Toni Morrison does just that. She takes photos that highlight the struggles and heroism of the civil rights activists (and their children) during the early years of southern integration and gives many of them their own little comment or story. Taken individually the photos are eye-opening affairs, even for adults that lived through those turbulent years. Taken as a whole they tell a tale that we should never forget.

The book is, in its own words, "a unique pictorial and narrative journey that introduces children to a watershed period in American history". In many children's books, such a title would begin with an Author's Note that speaks to adults about what the writer is attempting to accomplish. Morrison takes a different route. She speaks immediately to the child readers of this book. "This book is about you", she explains. She tells the kids about this dark period in American history. She gives them a briefing in the history and the multitude of reasons why we should never forget that this occurred. Then the pictures begin. They're all black and white images of a time long past. Segregated schools, dilapidated and far from equal. Small children like Ruby Bridges being led past screaming mobs of white people. Sit-in protesters smashed with eggs and glasses of water by red faced restaurant employees. Some of these pictures are familiar. The white and colored drinking fountains, for example. Some of them you'll have never seen before. White boys chasing a black one on the first day of integration at Central High School. An angry mob overturning a car containing black passengers. Children in Ku Klux Klan robes. But best of all are the photographs of the schoolchildren in the schools. The wary glances shared between white and black students (as displayed on the cover). The hand holding and learning under a single teacher. You can tell by looking that there's still a long way to go but that first step has already been taken. And Toni Morrison has helped to bring you there.

Morrison's words usually fit each picture perfectly. I thought she might have been giving a white boy carrying a boy carrying an anti-segregationist sign with his two friends a bit of a benefit of the doubt when she wrote, "I don't know. My buddies talked me into this". But it's nice of her to show that perhaps not all the white people presented here were evil. She also shows photographs of white people marching in protest with black, so you've a sense that the civil rights movement spanned all races and creeds. Her words give the child reader a chance to think and ponder what they see. Everyone here has a voice. Whether the reader agrees with that voice is not always a given.

"Remember" is an excellent way to introduce kids to a harsh moment in our nation's past. This type of format works perfectly with the subject matter. Better still, this is one way of showing to kids how children were the battleground of one of the nation's most contentious movements. Toni Morrison does their memory proud. A must for every library.

Morrison has captured an era in her skillful hands and held it out for all to see, a remembrance and a memorial as well. She presents reality, but has smoothed the harsh edges, so that the truth stands out plainly and clearly. Her gaze is focused upon progress toward equality, respect, dignity and non-violence.

The pictures that accompany Morrison's deceptively simple text add great depth to the meaning of the book. They add a touch of poignancy that makes it personal.

This book is a poetic experience, inspiring and uplifting - no matter what your age.

Excellent rhyming. It's a hip-hop update of an Aesop Fable favorite. My son and daughter really enjoyed reading it themselves, and having me read it.

Comic-book-style four-panel color drawings by Pascal Lemaitre provide an inviting format in Toni and Slade Morrison's "Who Got Game?" series. Their retelling of the classic Aesop fable about the lion and the mouse extrapolates quite a bit on the original, adding a zany and fun side to the tale and truly wonderful illustrations.

To hear Toni Morrison speak of narrative as "one of the principle ways in which we absorb knowledge," and language as "meditation," is to enter into a miraculously new understanding of what it means to sit down with a novel, biography, book of creative nonfiction, or even a simple short story. To note that she is stating these declarations while accepting the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature before members of the Swedish Academy doubles the thrill.

For those who have found masterworks by Morrison, such as "Beloved" and "Jazz," somewhat daunting, hearing what she appreciates most about literature provides invaluable clues to what one experiences in her own literary art. The autumn-breeze whisper of her voice is an enthralling contrast to the laser heat and precision of her mind nobly at work.

Aberjhani
author of "Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance"
and "Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black"

Toni Morrison's 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature has a potent message for any age. It is enabling because it directs a reader toward a means of becoming accountable for the well-being of one's own mind and soul.

The "lecture" is a tale of young people who visit an old, blind wise woman. They come with a mocking question emblematic of those whose pleasure is the discomfiture of others. Their question "Is the bird we have alive or dead?" tells her their souls are distressed. Yet she refuses to mock their condition and tells them a powerful truth. "The bird is in your hands, you know if it is alive or dead."

They respond that there is no bird and that her reply burns their hearts. She helps them to understand that there IS a bird.

The bird may be taken to be a mind, a soul, a life. It is symptomatic of the malaise of the '90s that people lack the courage to be accountable for their minds, souls and lives. To find the courage to inspect one's OWN life, to imagine how OTHERS might feel, is to unearth one's own intelligence and determination. Soul-enriching external social and internal spiritual connections are the treasure found in the discovery of the "bird."

It does not matter if there is no bird as a physical being. There is content in a spirit that always requires courage, intelligence and imagination to nurture. The act of inward seeing, the courage to face uncertainty and the willingness to experiment in the presence of others who may or may not understand you is the "bird" that will stay alive in the mind. The act of understanding in communion with others ensures a realm where souls may feel trust.

At the end of the tale, the old woman and her visitors have made a journey on which they found the "bird' and created a a comforting bond among themselves. That they might be "slaves" or "free" is irrelevant: their human condition allows them the conjoined energy to imagine and to create.

This is the most inclusive and interesting scholarly account of Jazz I have read so far. Unlike many scholars who have adopted Bakhtin's theory of dialogue wholesale in their discussion of ethnic women's writing, Tally supports all her arguments with unique clarity and consistency. Her book also gives a detailed overview of earlier critical responses to Morrison's Jazz.
The most intriguing is Part Two, where in her chapter-by-chapter analysis Tally demonstrates the manifestation of Morrison's dialogic imagination in Jazz. In disagreement with so-called "jazz critics", she examines jazz "not as the structure, strategy or aesthetic behind the creation of the novel, but as a perfect metaphor" underlying the novel: stories and the language used to tell them (61).The interpretation of generic intertextuality in the novel is most interesting, Tally notes that "the voice of the narrator is an imitation of hard-boiled fiction" (32)whose representative is Raymond Chandler.
In the book Tally explores the subtle ways in which Morrison is preoccupied with story-telling making at the same time room for the narrator's and other characters' voices "via the inflection of the words and phrases that call to intertextual references, or via the techniques of hybridizing which include other types of discourse within the surface narration"(138). Tally also highlights Morrison's narrative strategies which require active readerly participation such as the delaying of critical information, the extensive use of repetition, the narrator's intrusiveness, free association and circularity.
On account of its merits, I wish to recommend this book as a significant introduction to understanding Morrison's most complex novel for both scholars and "common" readers.

First of all: Tally's book is listed in the wrong category - it has nothing to do with music but is a study of Toni Morrison's novel 'Jazz'.
The Story of 'Jazz': Toni Morrison's Dialogic Imagination, is a worthy sequel to Justine Tally's previous monograph on Toni Morrison's 'Paradise'. With refreshing clarity Tally discusses structure, theme, and the intricate subtleties of Morrison's literary discourse in this novel, without ever losing sight of her main hypothesis, i. e. that 'Jazz', though set in the Harlem of the 1920s, is not primarily a book about African American music or the Harlem Renaissance, but rather one about story-telling itself, about how our knowledge of events is created, changed, received, and (mis)understood. Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas about the 'dialogic imagination' in literature serve as congenial theoretical tools for this analysis. In fact, Tally's use of Bakhtin's theories is one of the most convincing and illuminating applications of Bakhtinian thought one can find in the fields of literary criticism. On the side, Tally also makes readers aware of the affinities of 'Jazz' to the 'hard-boiled' detective novels of Raymond Chandler, whose laconic style and implicit social criticism Morrison employs but also subverts in the second novel of her trilogy. At the end, the narrator has no definite story but rather acknowledges the importance of the dialogic nature of language and its consequent shaping of our perception; this includes the recognition that the "self" can only be formed and perceived through the "other." The story of 'Jazz' is ultimately the story of the relationship of language to the conceptualization of the self. For Morrison as for Bakhtin, "[a]n independent, responsible and active discourse is the fundamental indicator of an ethical, legal and political human being."
A very rewarding read, highly recommended for everyone who is interested in literature and stimulating scholarly criticism.

There's only one way to remember them:reading
and humming the "song"they inspire along the
poetical and invoking lines of an almost shamanic
incantation rising to bring them back into
life so that we meet,know and re-bury them with love and
awe,with respect and recognition of
a sacrifice as supreme as crucifying itself.
They are all deities in the lost and sacred
society bush of ancestors long forgotten and recalled when the moments are
supreme, when it comes to love, life
and death: Beloved, Macon Dead, Violet, Circe...

There is nothing difficult in reading Ms Morrison. She is very detailed and that requires concentration. She answers no questions for you and perhaps that is what makes some readers say she is too complicated. If you remember the character, when she jumps forward or backward in the story, it is easy to pick up where she left off. Beloved is merely a song about a woman's commitment to not suffering any more indignities if it were in her power not to do so. Perhaps her initial method was extreme but then again, what is not extreme about enslavement? What is not extreme about a group of people having no history beyond the 19th century? What is difficult about her novels is that you have to have the answers to these questions before you start reading.

The Progressive Art Collection comprises more than 6,300 pieces displayed nationwide and represents the international gold standard for corporate collecting. This striking compendium represents a cross-section of the collection, showcasing the work of nearly 300 artists from Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Robert Rauschenberg, to Andreas Gursky, Brigitte Nahon, Petah Coyne, and Vik Muniz. This art is not mere food for thought. This is fuel for fire.

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1988, Toni Morrison frees herself from the bonds of traditional narrative and establishes an independent style, just as her characters have freed themselves from the horrors of slavery and escaped from Kentucky to Ohio. Revealing the story of Sethe and her family as they survive the brutality of the farm, only to encounter torments even more punishing than whippings after they escape, Morrison presents scenes in a seemingly random order, each scene revealing some aspect of life for Sethe, her boys, her dead baby Beloved, and the new baby Denver, both in the past and in the present. Moving back and forth, around, and inside out through Sethe's recollections, she gradually reveals Sethe's story to the reader, its horror increasing as the reader makes the connections which turn disconnected scenes into a powerful and harrowing chronology.

As the novel opens, Sethe and Denver have lived in #124, a house in Ohio, for eighteen years, refusing to socialize and enjoying no company. When Paul D. Garner, one of the Sweet Home men and a friend of her long-missing husband, arrives on her doorstep and moves in, Sethe slowly reveals her long-buried nightmares, and the two share their stories of the events leading up to their escape. Most haunting to Sethe is the death of her young daughter Beloved, shortly after the escape from the farm, though the reader does not know for many pages the shocking manner of her death. When a ghostly figure who calls herself Beloved arrives at #124, shortly after Paul D., Morrison creates mystery and a heart-stoppingly tense atmosphere, when Beloved, too, moves in. As Beloved gradually takes over the household and seems to demand and then possess Sethe's soul, the sorrow which has burdened Sethe seems close to breaking her.

The sadism of some slave-owners, the devices used to torture, and the desperate measures some slaves took to protect themselves and their loved ones come fully alive here, the horrors growing as the reader gradually discovers the real source of Sethe's torment. By forcing the reader to make the connections, instead of spelling out details in a traditional narrative, Morrison strengthens the impact of the novel and its brutal revelations. Symbols of water, rain, snow, and ice connect the disparate scenes, and the use of shadows and the ghostly character of Beloved keep the reader on tenterhooks until the action is eventually resolved. A powerful, atmospheric, and shocking novel, Beloved is also a searing indictment of slavery and the damage it has done to the fabric of life, damage that cannot be repaired until it is fully recognized through novels such as this. Mary Whipple

This is a classic written in Morrison's wonderful style which brings the reader into the heart of the characters. This particular edition is the paperback version that you will see most teenagers carrying around.