Toni Morrison Books

Short book by Tony Morrison based on her university lectures are three part mediatations on matters of race in americal literature. Morrison explores what is takes to be black. She looks at the literature from two points of view: reader - someone who absorbs what someone else has to say and writer - creator of stories that writes about their observations about the world and has influence over the reader in a manner of perception of truth. In addition to addressing race, she talks about gender too. It is subtly brought to our attention that in today's world it is much harder to be black woman than a black man. Black woman is more vulnerable to the cruelties of the world. Shades of her skin can either include her or exclude her from the black society, while the white society is tenfold more cruel as there is no acceptance of the "colored" folks but only hostility. In the literary world that Morrison critiques, black woman is considered an object with no emotion, attachment, dignity, susceptible to sexual trade or exploitation, as there are no consequences to such treatment. In another words, black woman is considered dispensable by the society. Black ordinary man on the other hand, while treated as a second class citizen -- can manage fine in a society for as long as he can draw a distance between himself and the white society. The detachment is assurance to the white society of freedom of "pollution" of any kind: spiritual, sexual and social. Black man who does not realize a need for such detachment can get beat up, whipped or vebrally abused. Unlike women, they end up short of rape. Finally, the political consequences of race is the last part of the book that inevitably blends into meditation on women and their role in the society as nurses, mothers and comforters of sorts. Although the preface to the book is written in 1992, this book gives very interesting insight to the state of the racial tension that is so obvious in the election year where race, gender, class and social standing are fearlessly fighting for power. This book, considered literary criticism is very relevant to our world of today. Morrison wisely teaches us to recognise what black is vs. what others want you to think, thru literary fiction, what black is.

It's not surprising that a black feminist author would want to trash the "dead white guys" who made American literature. What is interesting is the phony way Toni Morrison wants to hang racism solely on white men, never on white women. She spends page after page trying to dig up dirt on masculine writers like Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, while entirely ignoring the far more poisonous racism of white women like Margaret Mitchell and Edith Wharton.

Toni Morrison feels threatened by Huck Finn -- enough to trash him good -- and not at all threatened by Scarlett O'Hara. This is interesting. After all, Huck Finn risks his life to set a black man free, while Scarlett is an unrepentant slaveowner who feeds off black suffering like a parasite. So why is it that Scarlett gets a pass while Huck gets jumped on like a white jogger in Central Park?

Perhaps the problem is that Mark Twain isn't really attacking racism so much as he's attacking respectability. Twain suggests that it's the hunger for wealth, status, comfort, and respectability that causes people to mistreat others -- and that well-bred Widow Douglas is no better than white trash Pap Finn.

What Morrison resents is not that Twain is too tough on Nigger Jim, but that he's too tough on the Widow Douglas. It seems clear that Morrison doesn't want to be free in the sense that runaway Jim is free -- that is, to be able to come and go as she pleases and think her own thoughts. Secretly, she wants to be "free" in the way that Widow Douglas and Scarlett O'hara are free. She wants the life of luxury and privilege that the white ladies she secretly admires have always had. She'd rather pal around with rich white "ladies" like Mary Gordon (who is under the Barnard veneer the worst sort of shanty Irish bigot) than with trash like the black men now serving in Iraq. And she's perfectly willing to sell the trash down the river to do it, be they white or black.

If Morrison is playing in the dark, then indeed there are those who are angry in the light, so to give a negative reduction of what morrison was clearly stating about how blacks are viewed speaks in high volume, besides i dont know of many japanese who pinpointed out black ppl to enslave them............. even if they did have three eyes, two mouths, or whatever else. lol Another prime example that denial always ends with a bad term......... More emotional baggage disguised as constructive critism..........yawn....................

The reviewer below who said "More Heat Than Light" got it partly right. This book is SO badly written you have to wonder if the author's other works were written by the same person. Not only is it sophomoric, it is gibberish. Had its author been unknown, she would surely have had to pay for the book's publication. Incredibly bad, it may at least serve as a source of hope for struggling writers who believe that only the best works are accepted by publishers.

Toni Morrison is excellent in these three lectures. She analyzes some white American novels brilliantly and shows how the whole structure and meaning can be re-read from the presence of what she calls Africanism at the back of the mind of the author and at times in the novel itself. Her approach is far-reaching and does not only take into consideration the presence of a black person, but also the deeply metaphorical presence of a dark side in the author's imagination and novels, a dark side that informs the whole work and structures the plot and the story. She tries to explain this presence of this dark side by showing how the Europeans who fled Europe to come to America for a new start arrived with no real model to imitate, and that they had to structure their own personalities from scratch. This could only be done by finding an alter ego that will embody the « other » any person needs to build their personalities. This « other », she says, is naturally the African slave that brings together several differences that make him perfectly easy to become the object of this ego-building : social alienation (slaves), cultural and linguistic alienation (they have been torn away from their cultures and languages) and racial alienation (blacks). The last alienation makes the other two absolutely irreversible because it cannot in any way be changed or hidden. This explains the structuring power of race or rather blackness in this society whose hierarchical structure is never denied or even questioned. Yet I remain slightly unsatisfied in the absolutely uniqueness of this experience. The Europeans when they arrived found the Indians and they tried to make them subservient and even slaves. They could not do it because these Indians did not survive very long in such a position and the most enterprising ones, Cherokees, Iroquois, Seminoles, etc, learned very fast and easily conquered their autonomy and developed a viable economic system. So the Europeans turned to Africans who were rather easily turned into slaves, with no pangs of conscience for the Europeans because they were not natives, so the land was not theirs, and they were black, hence absolutely different by embodying century old fantasms and fears among Europeans who discarded black as being devilish, satanic, dirty, etc. Here we have to insist on one element that Toni Morrison discards too fast : the Europeans had to exterminate the un-enslavable Indians to get their land and then bring the Blacks to America. The Indian genocide is the primary condition for the enslavement of the Blacks. The second element is that she seems to consider the European Enlightenment justified this enslavement of the Blacks. Here I have to disagree because Monstesquieu, for one, and quite many others like Rousseau, Diderot, it is true mainly French people, rejected this approach that pretended Blacks were not human and even had no souls. This French Enlightenment actually produced the abolition of slavery by the French Revolution, even if Napoleon reinstated it later on. That would have enabled Toni Morrison to answer a question she does not ask because she has no answer : where did the abolitionists come from, where did abolitionism come from, if what she describes is the only connection with Europe ? But there is even another question. What she describes is in perfect agreement with the logic and dialectic of the « subject » as advocated by Lacan. Since she quotes Marie Cardinal she should have found out about Lacan. In absolutely any society so far (no developed class-less society has ever existed on the planet) when a subject rejects the « Authority » pole of his personality, authority that is embodied in someone else, in the « social other », that person is dominated by his impulses, positive and negative, and he becomes his only master. Then he has to rebuild this pole of his personality, and the « other » becomes the one he is going to reject. In all our societies there has been an « other ». She hints at social alienation and evokes cultural and linguistic alienation. But our societies have always found a scapegoat that became that « other » they could easily reject, enslave or even massacre : the Jews, the protestants or the catholics, the moslems, Arabs, gypsies, or even women as for that, and for some today in our lay societies priests and believers of any denomination, and our societies can even use one category of the past to build up the rejected group : fascists, nazis, stalinists, maoists, etc. The only point she has is the over-determination that color adds to this phenomenon, though Arabs or Moslems in Europe today, and for centuries in the past, qualify for that kind of racist attitude, and we all know about agism, sexism, homophobic attitudes and many others. She though has an enormous point when she says that invisibility does not solve the problem because the Blacks may be invisible in language, literature, and other politically correct discourses, but they remain visible and at times hauntingly overvisible in the minds of people. One cannot decree the end of racism with a law or a couple of anti-racist classes in school. I think that Ralph Ellison saw more and farther when he said « we have to be one and many at the same time », or when he defended democratic diversity in society and in each social or racial group of this society.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This is a very appropriate book on African-American studies. In an age when affirmative action has been dismantled and African-Americans relegated to the position of secondary citzenry, this book revives our faith in the potential of academia to offer solutions to problems facing the people of color in society. All scholars should learn from Kim.

There was a march for immigration over the weekend in Los Angeles and there were over 500,000 people there. As I marched, I realized how important this book was. It all came together for me -- how Toni Morrison's BELOVED proved to be African-American scripture. I came to think about how the march may be something similar to that for the Mexican community. We Mexicans are creating a type of scripture. Now, I appreciate Prof. Kim's book more. I am eager to read it again with the new insight.

There is an anti-black bias in academia -- particularly in the study of religion. If you see the recent hirings by Religion Departments in American universities, you can see that blacks were looked over and instead "other minorities" such as white women or a white Jew was chosen as a professor. Minority is a word that is used to disenfranchise blacks and other people of color and give power to white Jews and white women at the expense of the people of color. In such a climate in Religion Deapartments of American universities, this book is important. It shows that black voice in literature should be celebrated. I commend Kim for his contribution to raising awareness of the value of black scholarship.

This is a great book on African-American studies. I was moved by Prof. Kim's article and study on Toni Morrison, a premier African-American thinker of our time. I understand that Prof. Kim is doing further research on Toni Morrison and is working on a major academic monograph on the subject. I look forward to this book!

This is a very impressive book by a Lady Davis Fellow. Lady Davis was a wealthy noble Jewish lady from Britain who funded many charities and philanthropic enterprises. Lady Davis Fellowship still stands as the most prestigious fellowship an academic can hold in the State of Israel. I applaud Prof. Kim to utilizing his research from Israel to produce such creative scholarship to be shared with the whole world. He is like a candle unto the nations.

How can you truly convey the horror of a situation without horrifying words. Reality is profanity and Morrison gets that- she never chooses a profane word in place of something else but, rather, uses that word because it is the only one that can be used. Wonderful book about finding your own beauty.

I read this book years ago and I thought it was a very good book. It has curse words, but it is done in taste. There is nothing wrong with a word and there is nothing wrong with talking about sex. These things happen everyday and to try to go through the world as if they don't exist is childlike and naive. They do exist and that is what the author is trying to express. It's reality.

The Bluest Eye is about race relations and, as such, can never be completely understandable to a non-American such as me. It revolves around a simple and very sad story of rape, incest and the victimisation of a little girl in 1940s America. It is told from the point of view of blacks - this was before the term African-American - and partly in another child's voice. The little girl thinks herself ugly and envies the looks of blue-eyed whites. That a black child could consider herself physically inferior was a real shock to me, and for considering this only, the book is worth reading. One wonders how much this has changed in the last four decades.

There is a broader subject, however, which is the psychological impact and destructive power of models of beauty, especially feminine beauty. This, unfortunately, is only alluded to and could have been addressed in far more depth. The book also lacks the victim's own voice. Because it is told in chronological disorder and from different protagonists' angles, the story tends to be less strongly felt. At times it almost reads like a documentary. Perhaps this is for the best, since some scenes might have been unbearable if told by the central character herself. Still, while interesting and often revealing, this book too often gave me the impression of being unfinished.

Toni Morrison's book is a reminder of some of this country's painful history and the realization that in many ways, not much has changed. It's educational, a thrilling read and provokes important thought. Recommended for any reader, particularly of classical literature.

Seriously, this is the only review of this book? She uses bad language and there is a lot of sexuality? Unfortunately, I haven't read this book (which is why I am looking at it on Amazon in the first place) but I thought people who looked at this page deserved a better review than that, so here is the Amazon.com review of the other cover version of the novel:

Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.

Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.

There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.

This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus --

Morrison as usual takes us to a place...she writes a fictious story, but it is true in all form. She encourages us to look at language. Morrison is brillant and her use of descriptive, vibrant, language not only tells us a story about language...but, has many underlining meanings. I think the old, blind, woman is Morrison writes about is...herself.

This Nobel acceptance speech is not only a masterful message about language, integrity, courage, and literature, it also happens to be one of the most powerful statements I've encountered about what it means to be a good teacher. Every educator should read this.

Morrison delivers the line that gets drawn in the sand. She asks us to pick a side. A side for language to live with us, or die with us. Some of the most inspirational words i have ever read.

Toni Morrison is an awesome writer and truly deserves this prize not just for "Beloved", but for this wonderfully written speech. She is one of the best writers of today.

Toni Morrison delivered a fine lecture upon her acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. The lecture is dominated by a central parable: about an elderly African-American woman sage who is questioned by some young people.

This parable is a bit overdone, and I found it less than convincing by the end of the text. But the lecture as a whole is thought provoking and even inspiring. Morrison's language is elegant and powerful, and she shares important insights. Especially important, in my opinion, are her cautionary words about the potential use of language as an oppressive force. Overall, I find Morrison's Nobel Lecture to be a fascinating component of her larger body of work.

Beautiful mystical and absolutely perfect.

Artistcally, Camara's novel displays many of the weaknesses of a young novelist's first work: too often lush images do not equate character development, enthralling scenes seem to be written for themselves without significantly contributing to the novel's overall construction or character development, and the conclusion seems to surrender to his inability to have a clear (moral or ideological) intention behind the very problematic quest of the hero Clarence. In significant ways, I doubt that Camara had a clearly articulated or organic vision for the novel or the main characters: one increasingly recognizes the colonizer's satiric portrait, but the depictions of the major African figures seem even more dismissively caricatured. Ultimately, this novel sits uncomfortably between a colonized and a nationalist mentality, between the coopted view of a Sekyi and the mature nationalism of Soyinka's great novel "The Interpreters." Granted, from an African point of view, Camara is seeking to explore the very unsavory history of a people's colonization, if not their romance with the colonizer's image, but Achebe does it much more astutely in "Arrow of God," but both pale in comparison to Cheney-Coker's stunning epic "The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar."

This book is a wild trip. The main character is a white French man, living in an unidentified African setting (although the author must have been inspired by his Guinean background), who is totally broke. We don't know anything about his backgrounds, his reasons for being in Africa, or his prior professional occupations. Rejected by the French community, he is bummed. To get out of his misery, he wants to meet a mysterious African king, and apply for a position as advisor at the court. In his quest to find the king, the white man gives up his 'white' identity, and gets in touch with a variety of weird and fascinating characters: an old griot, two annoying boys, a mad village priest. During his journey, 'regular' situations rapidly degenerate into eery hallucinations.

One of the things I especially liked in this breathtaking literary masterpiece was that Camara Laye didn't emphasize human weaknesses of a white oppressor (like Oyono enjoys doing, although I like Oyono a lot); Laye didn't try to denounce Colonialism as a system either, like Cheikh Hamidou Kane or Pramoudya Ananta Toer have done (quite well, of course) - I think that a novel is not the most suited platform to do that: characters quickly tend to become boring academic abstractions rather than interesting people and the literary power of the work suffers. Instead, Laye gradually "forgets" the whiteness of his main character, emphasizing the humanity of all players.

Anyway, Camara Laye's "The radiance of the king" (I read the original French "Le regard du roi" - I can only hope the translation is just as good) is a truly unique book in style and content. Definitely a must-read!

Clarence is a European with a gambling debt, who has been austracized by his countrymen in an ambiguous place in colonial Africa and without anything more than the clothes on his back. He is determined to meet the king, thinking that the monarch will certainly take him in as a "worldly" advisor. When initial attempts to catch the king's attention fail, Clarence is lead south by an old beggar and two young boys to await the king, who will be touring this area of his dominion. Time passes as Clarence waits, and as this happens our young and arrogant hero becomes a more humbled through a series of events deep in the forested South.

This story was intriguing to me, and it reminded me very much of Alejo Carpentier's "The Lost Steps" with the theme of a man arrogantly thinking he is capable of anything, but whose ignorance is exposed once he is taken out of the culture and environment he is accustomed to.

There is a twist in the plot of the story which surprised me, but I think some readers would see it coming a lot earlier than I did. There is a lot of symbolism that I completely missed until I read Toni Morrison's introduction after finishing the book. I wish I had read this for a book group because it would spark a great discussion!

Although Toni Morrison's introduction to this book raves about its unique character and its genius, to me the introduction is more about the deeply thoughtful mind of Toni Morrison and not about this book. I found the main character, Clarence, to be rather shallow and naive and uninteresting, which is why my interest was not able to be sustained throughout its narrative. I understand this work was published in 1954, which makes its author a revolutionary in even conceiving of it, but for me it is allegorical and is teaching an object lesson to white civilization about African civilization. And that lesson is hammered home on every page until finally there is an understanding reached. I think I get it.
Perhaps it's me, but I just can't read novels that are constructed in this way. They are too didactic, too unliterary. I'm sorry Mr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., but I am a lover of literature and I did not admire or enjoy this book. But I do appreciate its historical and sociological importance, and for that alone I gave it 3 stars.

When I started this novel I loved it- I loved the author's writing style. It flowed. Sometimes it felt almost like poetry. But I felt hugely let down by her about a quarter of the way through. Why? Well...

This novel contains 3 sex scenes, none of which make easy reading and one of which is the rape of an 11 yr old girl; it has one scene of a boy breaking a cat's back on purpose, and another of a girl poisoning a dog (followed by description of how the dog staggers about and dies a painful death).
In a novel of only around 160 pages long, I thought this cheap. It was voyeuristic. I'm not surprised that it was ignored for about 25 years. it is only in the new climate of political correctness that it has become esteemed.

One reviewer told me that this was the point, that Morrison shows us the gritty, nasty, unfairness of the world.
Well if you want to know how awful the world is, read a newspaper. This was cheap shock tactics. I only finished the novel because it was a set text on my course.

The MAX NOTES were a godsend, as they helped so much that I could write a successful essay without having to plough through this novel a second time.

Don't buy the book unless you want nightmares or like feeling sick.

I love this book. The book explains the truth about how many little girls feel about their looks and about themselves, in general. This book can make you laugh and cry. This book can also, make you very confused, but at the end there is no confusing the books point about life and how a few people can ruin someone's life by selfishness or lack of compassion. I had to give it a five.

The book is called "The Perfume" by Patrick Süskind. it's about a man in France in the 18th century. He is born without a bodysmell and with the best smellingsence in the world. After a childhood with problems he becoms a man who makes perfums. And his project becoms to extract the smell of human beings from young girls.

This was the most depressing book I ever read. I kept waiting for something good to happen, just one small thing that shows that there was some joy in the characters life.

I was so frustrated and disappointed at the end of the book, I vowed not to read another book from Oprah's book list.

A good story to help children learn about bullying behaviors & to illustrate that a little power can certainly go to one's head with disasterous results.

An absolutely amazing book for children and adults. This book is thought provoking and has a wonderful message about the appreciation of artists. My four year old son and I love this book and it has quickly become one of our favorite bedtime stories. the rhyme and rhythm of the book make it a fun read as well.

It's ok to have an appreciation for the arts. What's NOT ok is the author's message to kids that it's ok to completely cast aside your responsibility to provide for yourself in the pursuit of your dream of being an artist. What would have been a better twist on this story is that in the end the ant was not only a responsible citizen but an artist as well. I don't recommend this version. Stick with the original Aesop's fable version. ART IS WORK but if nobody wants to buy it then you better be able to eat it.

"How can you say I never worked a day? Art is work. It just looks like play." Pascal Lemaitre's funny cartoons illustrate this fun story of friendly conflict between an ant and his grasshopper friend. This rollicking rhyme/cartoon combination follows a series of conflicts between the two buddies as they test each other.

This collection of essays is an accessible, thought-provoking work. If you want to get behind the unarticulated true reasons why Americans were so disturbingly fascinated by the Simpson case, the book gives you much to think about. Yes, racism, sexism, distrust of the legal system, etc. is discussed, in many instances brilliantly. I will be using many of the ideas and concepts presented in this book in the work I do with young high school students and Stanford University students grappling with racism, gender issues and homophobia here in privileged, upscale Palo Alto.

This is required reading for anybody interested in understanding the circus around O.J. Simpson's trial, in particular for liberl whites who pretended to have felt betrayed. The essays hardly deal with questions of guilt or innocence (although I got the feeling that most authors did believe in O.J.'s guilt), but with the question of why the response was so violent and bigoted, why white liberals accepted the trial by the media, some even joining in the media lynching. Essays are somewhat uneven, but in general very good and enlightening. Particularly striking were Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Ishmael Reed, the former elegant and poised, the latter in cold rage. Disappointing (for me, of course) were Ann duCille with her pre-digested Marxism, and Claudia Brodsky Lacour, who spoke more of Kant than of OJ, with a Baroque and convoluted style, quite appropriate for the Enlightment but hardly for the subject at hand. A question that came to my mind was why white Liberals tend to believe that African Americans should be forever grateful when a White Liberal treats them as equal. And then, they feel betrayed when their white hands are not licked in gratitude. After all, it is not a favor. Mind you, I happen to be what is normally known as white. In summary, excellent collection, to be highly recommended to objective people trying to understand the bitterness of African Americans in today's America

I've bought this audiobook as a help to understand it. Its more easier to listen the story rather than to read it. I recomand it to you especially as a repetition for a matura exam.

The happiest moments of a liberal arts education usually take place late in the evening in a dormitory lounge or in a local bistro over several cups of coffee. They're conversations, often between two similarly minded people, that explore a favorite subject. Browsing through Imagining Characters is like lingering in a seat at the next table.

The works selected are an English major's hit list of mainly nineteenth century women's novels. Byatt and Sodre bring their experience as a fiction writer and a clinical psychologist, respectively, to their understandings and develop complementary insights rather than rigorous debates.

This isn't everyone's cup of java. The reader who enjoys this volume probably relishes at least half of the novels discussed, smiles at being called a feminist, and prefers discussion to formal criticism.