Toni Morrison Books

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.

The 1987 edition of Inventing the Truth originated in the winter of 1986 as a series of talks sponsored by the Book-of-the-Month Club at the New York Public Library. A shadow of its predecessor, Extraordinary Lives (1986), this slender book has as its theme, reminiscences about writing memoirs. Although novelist Toni Morrison and medical writer Lewis Thomas veer off to a degree from this theme, all the essays are valuable as examples of good writing. There is no index, but the volume concludes with fascinating annotated bibliographies of the authors' favorite first-person narratives.

In a housing tract called Poverty, population seven, a grave is dug, then filled, even though eight year old Little's body is missing. This unsentimental first novel revolves around the seven people who knew the nearly silent Little and who scratch out a difficult life on a Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota. They lend their voices and perspectives, some contradictory, to this bleak story of how Little came to "be in everything." The heart of this novel is not Little, however, but the people who knew him. Even though Little is not a major character the way his brother Donovan is, he represents the deformity in the others that must be overcome to survive.

Treuer has structured his novel in individual stories that are connected more through the association of the characters than any solid narrative drive. His writing is stark - sometimes poetic and others ordinary, but always fitting the mood of the moment. If this novel suffers from anything, it's obtuseness. The reader knows when he is supposed to read more into dialogue or a description, but the connections aren't always clear. The author's talents far outweigh this flaw, as Poverty and its residents are memorable, complex creations.

LITTLE is not an uplifting novel, nor is it an easy read, so readers looking for these qualities should look elsewhere. For those interested in literary fiction or in issues facing contemporary Native Americans, you will find much offered here by the author of a later work, THE HIAWATHA.

This was a great book. I think it's very impportant for many to read this book at come time. Milkman learned many important life lessons that we all need to learn. I enjoyed her style of writing, she is a great author. She used many excellent writing techniques, such as, the motif of "flying" to create symbolism and imagery.

1. Toni Morrison is brilliant at describing ghosts and the haunting of the past, intricate race relations, and the passions and pathologies that develop among people.

2. In Tarbaby, a white Philadelphia couple moves to a tiny Caribbean island with their black servants. The servants' niece, to whom the Philadelphia couple act as patrons, is a beautiful young woman who works as a model in Paris but comes to the Caribbean during Christmas to regroup and decide where to go next. A mysterious stow-away, a black man from the American South, crashes their Christmas party and incites the spilling of secrets, forever altering relationships between people, including his own with the Parisan model.

3. Their love affair occupies the second part of the novel, one which takes us to New York and to rural Florida. There, they are haunted by ghosts or by the lack thereof.

4. Morrison traffics in metaphors, universes of them, so that you as a reader must decipher the personal metaphors and cosmogonies of each character as the novel unfolds. In Tar Baby, the most beautiful one is of smell - the stowaway wishes to press his smell, and his dreams, of baking pie and small town America, into the subconscious of the model, who luxuriates in furs and jewels, before her heady perfume of "white" success presses into him. This metaphor works beautifully on the level of a cultural and capitalist imperialism, the subtle persuasion of material dreams that encourage people around the world to slowly abandon "old" ways for the new. But I find that she aligns this too easily with race, and works much better as a metaphor about the misguided expectations within a relationship.

5. The hypnotic switching of voices and unidentifiable pronouns somehow reflects the lull of equitorial heat, and the speed of the city also reflects in her episodic narrative of New York. Morrison's writing style is always lush and gorgeous, even if her central metaphors don't always click the whole way through.

After reading Paradise, I found myself going back and rereading parts of the text. Toni Morrison is a breathtaking, experienced writer who proves why she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. This book really talks about two cultures, the male-dominated Ruby, Oklahoma and a Convent run by Catholic nuns who also take in women seeking refuge. The first chapter named Ruby explains the circumstances surrounding the possible massacre at the Convent caused by the angry men of Ruby who sees the Convent as a threat to their community. The women are described as weird for leaving their abusive husbands and families for the convent. Their minister preaches that the place is a coven rather than a convent. In actuality, the place is a refuge or sanctuary for the women of the convent. Not all are nuns, the other women in the convent don't take vows but they do respect the lives of the nuns and they become an unorthodox, non-traditional community and support group for each other. For them, this Convent has become paradise since it's a haven from the abusive world of men. Morrison doesn't imply or suggest that the women are actually lovers but there are hints of lesbianism among them. It's not like they don't have their share of problems. The women are viewed by the locales as weirdoes and outsiders. The men don't understand why the women live there alone by choice. It's because the men's behavior of constant abuse whether they have been beaten or raped is what draws the women there. Morrison writes on each female character after Ruby like Mavis, Grace, Divine, Colosanta, and others. The chapters help explain what motivates women to go there seeking a non-threatening and non-abusive environment. In a sense, that is what Paradise is about for these women. In actuality, women's choices were few which included either entering the Convent or marrying and producing. Women who did not enter the convent or marry and become mothers became an object of scorn and curiousity. The unmarried women are the subject of rumors but even more so over the centuries. The Convent where the Sisters of any order live is a sanctuary and there are healthy relationships and unhealthy relationships as in all families. The sisterhood whether it's ordained by the Catholic Church or by a group of women comes together to support each other in a man's world. I was very impressed by Morrison's book. I think she gets better with each one over time.

I considered myself a fan of Toni Morrison but I had a
really hard time with this one. The stream of consciousness
that made her a star with her other highly-elevated novels,
for example Beloved, doesn't quite come together correctly
in this book. The book has too many characters, which is
fine but all of them are given equal importance, making
it extremely difficult for the reader to understand what
to grasp onto. I think Morrison may be trying to too hard
with this one and should instead just let the story unfold.

It's still a great story though and I honestly couldn't give
it below four stars.

This complex cluster of stories will keep you guessing and trying to figure it all out. It can be a difficult read, but it's well worth it.

This is a huge book encompassing human fear, love, sex, religion, and destruction of society. The story is of women and color and society. Morrison writes in strong, intelligent language. The story slips in and out of space and time fluidly. It's complex and engaging. Not an easy read but worth it.

I find it disturbing that many reviews, some of which are listed on this site, devalue this book because it doesn't deliver "a point"; but I would find this, or any devaluation, disturbing since this is one of my favorite books by Morrison. There is something to be said for subjectivity in the enjoyment of any work; often this is what separates a fine or noteworthy novel from a disappointing or lackluster one. I would, however, question the validity of those who look for a conspicuous or conclusive "point" in a work of literature. It's not an expository essay, people; it's a novel, one that seeks to question your conceptions of class, race, and gender.

Clearly, I'm a defender of this novel. I found it poetic and affecting. I did not find that it plodded on or lacked description or injudiciously pointed fingers. I found that Morrison's tale of an all black town's xenophobia provided an engaging backdrop for issues of identity, intra-racial color politics, and misogyny. I felt the characters' pain and triumphs and hatred and cared enough about them to be disappointed and overjoyed. Perhaps I brought so much of my baggage to the party, I simply had to show up to enjoy myself. After all, I am black ... and a woman; but I don't feel you have to be a black woman to appreciate this tale. I suppose you just have to be okay with not having "the point" served to you on a platter. Great works of art are often inconclusive, but they've done their part when they've triggered both emotional and intellectual responses that force one to question his or her stance on traditional issues.

Again, these things are subjective; however, I love this book. Some of you will also love it. Others of you will not. Pick your poison.

I was extremely disappointed in SULA, I had to force myself to read the entire book. I found it to be very boring.

I have read a lot of books, but this has to be one of the worst that I have ever read! I found it to be terribly slow and very hard to get interested in, not to mention that there are several parts that are downright offensive. Don't waste your time, there is much better reading out there!

Toni Morrison writes so well it just flows out, but the horror it leads to is both disturbing and unexpected.

Morrison's writing style is unique and demanding - and most readers like it like that.

"Sula" is a simple story about complicated people which Morrison paints in terribly artful language. It is drama, it is insightful prose, and it is a great reading novel.

Bad versus good are the constant theme. Sula is theoretically bad. And, the starched personalities of the town in which they live, Medallion, are the good. But, at the very end, Sula's once best friend has an epiphany and seems to recognize that Sula is not bad, and that other's perceptions of her were wrong, terribly wrong. But, Sula is selfish. Most of the others are anything but. And, that divide creates many of the problems, and more.

Selfishness includes getting something others cannot obtain. Sula gets an education. Sula gets to travel. Sula gets her grandmother's money and does not need to work. Sula gets her grandmother's home - large. Her life is easy. She has it all. And, the others cannot see her doing anything constructive with it. And they are right. In fact, she can be outright destructive - but not necessarily by ill will. She is just too self absorbed.

Each chapter commences with a year - indicating the calendar year of the growth of the girls - Sula and Nel, Sula's best friend who later has the inconceivable violation by Sula separate them for the rest of their lives. Before their 1910 birth, we learn something about their respective parents and Sula's maniacal grandmother. And, along the way Medallion's other "far out" characters like Shadrack (whose eccentric January 3 annual suicide celebration reminds me of the strange idiosyncracies displayed by people of John Berendt's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"(Modern Library)).

But, as you turn pages of this book, you learn these uncommon people in the common town of Medallion are people you would love to learn and learn to love. People like these characters are the bedrock of America.

Like Morrison's novels, this book includes more eye-opening accounts of the white man's cruelty to man with behavior that people today find hard to believe was countenanced by our forefathers. For example: trains had no bathrooms for blacks so they had to run to fields at certain stops and use leaves for paper; no blacks of Medallion were hired for construction which was located at their town; black people who ran through white cars would be threatened to be "red lighted" by conductors; black men would be arrested and beaten for matters which caused white women to commit torts upon other white women (car accident caused by jaywalker); and a drowned boy who floated down river would not be returned for three days because whites would not carry his corpse back the two miles until a ferry was available.

Depressing is something which is not uncommon in Morrison's novels, but being black in the wrong time in America's history may be more the cause of this result than Morrison's style or focus. And, the topics she addresses are serious topics which deserve to be aired, deserve to be read, and are honored to be written about by someone of her literary acclaim.

This is a very good book by a Nobel laureate - it is a must read.

Written in 1973, Toni Morrison's second novel explores themes of life, love, sex, and death, contrasting Sula Peace and Nel Wright, best friends from childhood who grow up to lead totally different adult lives. Living in the Bottom, an ironically named, poverty-stricken black community in the hills of Medallion, Ohio, Sula and Nel, opposites in personality, share their thoughts, feelings, and secrets, some of them of life-and-death importance. Part of a family with a long history of violence, Sula believes she owes nothing to anyone except herself, while Nel's strict mother imposes limits and insists on her adherence to social values.

Though Sula eventually escapes the Bottom in the 1920s to attend college and travel from Georgia to California, Michigan to Louisiana, she always does what is expedient, having no real values or ambitions, other than her own pleasure. When Sula returns to the Bottom in 1937, the stable Nel is a wife and mother trying to keep her family fed and clothed, a woman who no longer has anything in common with Sula, though she becomes Sula's innocent victim. Morrison develops Sula's character through her dysfunctional relationships and selfish actions, showing her connections to her family's past but never blaming it for her later abhorrent behavior.

The novel is a series of cycles and follows a circular structure, opening in 1965, as whites decide they want the Bottom land for golf courses and hilltop views and the blacks who have always lived there move to the valley with its more fertile land. The cyclical nature of life is also borne out in the lives of the characters, especially that of Sula, who escapes Bottom but returns inevitably to the community of her mother and grandmother. Racial segregation, accepted as a given, underlies all facets of the novel, but Morrison focuses on character here, avoiding polemics and creating a novel which manages to be tough but often darkly humorous, emotionally sensitive but often brutal, compassionate but realistic about human nature.

Rich with imagery and symbolism, the novel is also accessible and involving. Morrison creates characters with whom the reader identifies, even in Sula, who is a less than sympathetic protagonist; Shadrack, the shell-shocked war veteran who opens and closes the novel, wrings the heart even as he lives a life of absurdity. Filled with irony, intricate in structure, and well-developed in its themes, Sula is less complex than some of Morrison's later novels, but satisfying in its vividly drawn view of a struggling black community unified in its poverty. n Mary Whipple

Song of Solomon
Beloved
JazzThe Fiction Of Toni Morrison: Reading and Writing on Race, Culture, and IdentityConversations With Toni Morrison (Literary Conversations Series)

If you're planning to teach Morrison, don't bother purchasing this book; for lit instructors, it isn't going to provide profound insights. "Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison" was far more helpful in my experience.

This is definitely my recommendation for a "one-stop" analysis of Morrison's fiction. I do not agree with all of David's opinions - we all have them. However, like an archeologist excavating a buried treasure, he meticulously unravels the meaning behind the language, the naming of the characters, the technique behind the delivery. He further demonstrates how Morrison makes use of biblical doctrine, musical structure and myth in her work. The analysis of Paradise is by far the most intelligent, well-written critique I've read to date. Toni Morrison Explained provides a range of possible interpretations for the reader to ponder and ultimately integrate with our own experience of the Nobel novelist writings. Kudos to David for doing the work required to experience Morrison's fiction on a whole `nother level.

It's wonderful to read analyses of Morrison's extremely complicated novels written by a real person, in real language that isn't phony, confusing, or pretentious. Ron David writes as a real person would talk, something that I found extremely enjoyable (although I can see where some would find it annoying). I love that, while he praises Morrison as the finest author of our time, he is not afraid to point out and openly criticize much of her writing, particularly THE BLUEST EYE. I thoroughly enjoyed what he had to say about JAZZ; if anything, he makes you feel better about not understanding all of her writings. David's admittance that he doesn't understand what the hell JAZZ was all about is enough to make us all feel better about not understanding it, either. His style is wonderfully intimate, friendly, and easily readable. This book is highly reccommended to anyone who has struggled with Morrison. It also made me feel proud to discover that many readers are never even able to finish her books--and I've read four.

In this book one will find information about Morrison's novels which is universally known. It is a kind of anthology of bit and pieces of reviews and critiques; it is bereft of anything original. What is missing is any attempt by the author to analyze subtextually any of the novels. I found the chapter on "Jazz" woefully inadequate and chatty. If, according to the author's admission, he did not understand "Jazz," why on earth did he assay an attempt to "analyze" it. I think Oprah could have done a better job!!!

Even if you have never read any of Toni Morrison's work, reading this commentary and explication is such an enjoyable experience, you might put aside that other book that you haven't yet finished. David has a technique and style of drawing you into his unique approach to literary criticism--which this is not--and to chatty and healthy conversation about what Toni Morrison did or did not do, and what her books really mean. Eye-opening and quite entertaining, this work will likely be consulted by many a student in many a literature course, and by many a fan of Morrison. It jusy might open the door to a whole new school of interpretation!

It's worth reading, a brilliant piece of work.Wahneema Lubiano did it one more time.

I also recommend
The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader

Hi. The comments of the other 1-star reviewer about the book being nonsense is, in many ways, justified. One article in the book, "The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness," by Patricia Williams is one example of a piece that I found several ridiculous generalizations,etc. Check out the book "A Different Mirror" by Takaki. This instead has lots of evidence, is well-written,etc.... Whew, incoherent writing stinks (and doesn't do the world any good...it just makes some confused, angry...Maybe incoherent writing really is a sign of! Get a change with Takaki's book. here's an essay response I did for a class regarding a piece in the book: Is it Me or the Writing?

Patricia Williams' piece, "The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness," left me feeling confused and whirled about with extreme statements lacking support. Part of this is because the writer made generalizations or statements that lacked evidence. The statement, "...one loses sight of the fact that some `successfully assimilated' ethnics in the United States have become so only by paying the high cost of burying forever language, customs, and cultures (253)," lacks evidence. The writer's statement would have been more convincing if she gave accounts of people who forever buried their language, customs, and culture. I doubt there are people who forever buried, so to speak, their language, customs, and culture as result of the process of assimilation (and if they felt embarrassed, in the U.S., by their ethnicity/culture and thus decided to toss it aside, then that's their choice...one does not have to forever bury their ethnic identity in order to successfully assimilate...assimilation doesn't necessarily mean "loosing something"). The statement is ridiculously extreme and dramatic without warrant in saying "burying forever."
Another extreme statement lacking support refers to African Americans, "whose submission is seen as a generous and proper `gift' to others rather than as involving personal cost (258)." Sure, there might be some people who think this, but there are also people who don't think this. Who sees the submission of African Americans as "generous?" In fact, who sees African Americans as submissive? If the writer wants to be convincing and not have me take the statement as ridiculously extreme and unsupported, tell me who these people are, and give me examples of cases. Otherwise, I cannot take the ideas seriously.
The writing also left me feeling confused. In addition to numerous statements based on pure personal opinion and no evidence that made me yearn to read something with logic and evidence (a.k.a. writing of merit), the piece felt like a bunch of loose threads. Where was the conclusion? Are there problems that need to be thought about and fixed? What should I do with the ideas I just was given (well, most of the piece was pure extreme opinion lacking support and generalizations or even fallacies that maybe we can't do anything constructive on what it talked about). The piece was abstract in many ways that maybe a conclusion wouldn't even have been possible.
In conclusion, the piece had some good points that were outnumbered by generalizations lacking evidence. The writer might feel passionate about the issue of ethnicity in America, but the poor writing and poorly thought-out ideas destroyed its potential to amount to something clear and constructive. Maybe (or maybe not) after reading the piece over again I won't still be asking, " So what the hell are you saying?" while reading through most part of the piece (and if so, I'll retract my statements and regret not reading it carefully enough). The only way that effective change (regarding issues of harmful racism, or even about poverty, or about the economy) can take place in a timely manner is if there is clear communication (spoken, written) and well-thought-out, logical ideas and plans.

The title says it all. According to the essay writers in this book, America practically descriminates worse now than it did before the civil rights movement. Sure, the world is not perfect, but from the the words of these people, you would think that blacks were still being actively and severly descriminated against. Of course, there are no alternative views (besides common sense), so I again call this book what it really is, typical liberal nonsense.

This book was great...Ignore terse comments from others...