Colson Whitehead Books

If you are a twenty-something or younger, lean left politically, don't care whether your cartoons look pretty, and are into irreverent and usually vulgar humor, Get Your War On is the promised land. I find Get Your War On to be gutbustingly funny, but through trial and error I've discovered that receptiveness to the humor is limited by certain demographic realities.

I've tried to share this with my left-leaning sixty something mom and she just couldn't get past the profanity. I tried to share it with some left-leaning twenty somethings and they couldn't get past the clip art. I tried to share it with some politically conservative hipsters and they couldn't get past the politics.

So, sadly, a narrow demographic. But for that demographic, it just doesn't get much better. These are the kinds of WTF? conversations that you had with your friends after 9-11, trying to make sense of a world in which even the good guys seemed nuts. A world in which the question "Why do they hate us?" was answered in record speed with the trite "because of our freedom."

Get Your War On has all the emotions of the post 9-11 world: ambivalence, fear, dread, rah-rahing in spite of oneself, and finally resignation to living in a world that is dominated by religious extremists and misguided actors.

If you're reading this review, you likely know what Get Your War On is all about from looking at the strips at www.mnftiu.cc. So your last remaining question may be what the book's production values are like and whether it is worth buying. The answers are: very good and yes, buy it, the profits go to clearing mines in Afghanistan. Besides, it's more convenient to leave the book on your coffee table instead of a dedicated monitor displaying the comics from the website.

I began reading "Get Your War On" shortly after it began. I was a 9/11 iconoclast who felt alone and maybe even a little sociopathic as I coldly observed the victimhood-embracers around me. Reading David Rees' work gave me immense relief. It came from the heart of a fellow spirit; a cry of grief and rage over Bush's insane joke of a war.

Certainly many readers may be put off by Rees' street talk. (I grew up when middle class children seldom heard such words and many weren't printable.) But there is a difference between people who use profanity through ignorance--or hack writers who want an easy laugh--and David Rees. As a writer, his command of American vernacular English impresses me even more than David Mamet does in "Glengarry Glen Ross." Furthermore, his language is entirely suited to his purpose.

I've alway been a great fan of Tom Tomorrow. His use of old advertising images gives an additional level meaning to his work for those who remember the 50's. Although I'm amused by Rees' use of familiar clip art I believe he has the imagination to go much farther.

I urge you to buy and read this book. I, for one, am very eager to see where Rees' talent will take him next.

I laughed at some of these, but alot of them just came across as bitching disguised as humor. I mean, biting humor is supposed to be about humor, not about just flat out hostility towards the butt of your joke.

"Get Your War On," by David Rees, consists of a series of cartoons in which a cast of office drones discuss life in America during the post-9/11 war on terrorism. Among the topics covered are the military campaign in Afghanistan, the anthrax scare, and the phenomenon of suicide bombing. The tone is satirical, with a very harsh edge.

I found the book sometimes clever, but sometimes it is just unfunny ranting. Much of the humor comes from the pairing of banal white collar images with the often over-the-top, profanity laden dialogue.

This book, and THE FRENCH and GERMANS, really have it right. This war was a waste of time, money, and American lives.

The Intuitionist starts with some stream of consciousness effects - disorienting moments of being dropped into a narrative abruptly. But then the narrative rapidly turns into a murder mystery with a fabulous unfolding of layers of corruption and self referencing detail that build upon further details in grand fashion. (p.s. the murder victim is an elevator). This is a mystery novel - with lots of mid-century Dashel Hammet style detailing - but it's also science fiction because this isn't our world. This parallel universe looks like 1950s New York, sort of. The mix of social realities and technologies cuts across eras and addresses the post-war American cultural landscape in a mad totality. This story is also a powerful analysis of race, like Invisible Man. The central plot element turns around racial identity and its implications. I'm not going to give spoilers so I'll leave it at that.

The central trope - elevators - metaphoric of transcendence and change is good stuff. Whitehead treads the rope ladder of metaphor very gently and it never overwhelms. It sure made me notice elevators more in personal life, though.

Why not five stars? There are are moments where I see Whitehead's trying too hard - like seeing the wires at a puppet show. Never enough to derail me from turning the page and quickly becoming engrossed again. This is a great first novel, but I can see where Mr. Whitehead has room to mature. I'm looking forward to reading his subsequent works. Mr. Whitehead knows how to write dialog and he knows how to plot and pace the narrative - and he understands the most important aspect of keeping it interesting: how to twist it. Trust me - you'll never see what's coming. The way he wraps this up is brilliant and surprising and very thought provoking. This book is worth reading on a lot of levels.

How to describe Colson Whitehead's debut novel, The Intuitionist, a parable of race relations through the lens of competing factions of elevator inspectors in a fictional pre-civil rights American city? Check the thesaurus for synonyms for audacious - bold, works, as does brash. Now a writer of no small renowned, with a catalogue of excellent works and awards to his name, one can only wonder at the venturesome spirit that led to this deep complex novel which brings nothing so much to mind as the word sprawling.

The novel's protagonist, Lila Mae, is many times an outcast from her community of elevator inspectors. To begin with she's an African American. And she's a woman. And she has a perfect inspection record. And she's an "Intuitionist," a member of a school that uses an insurgent inspection philosophy based on the feel of the machine as opposed to the careful measurements taken by the majority "Empiricist" school. If perhaps she sounds perfect, quite the opposite is true, as she is not only deeply flawed, but often not quite likeable.

The plot of the work involves an elevator accident at a building Mae inspected, which she knows was no accident, and her search for the truth - which involves the war between the competing schools in the upcoming elevator inspector's guild elections, the lost plans for the next generation elevator designed by the late great design genius Fulton, and Fulton's secret which none want to see come to light. If these stakes seem not all that interesting, than know that Whitehead's novel is really a meditation on BIG themes - race, class, technology, capitalism, urbanism, the human condition. Through it all, he maintains a sly wit and thoughtful rendering of this world which is at once strange yet wholly believable.

While at less than 300 pages the Intuitionist is not a long work, it sprawls over a huge landscape of issues and character. At times one feels Whitehead struggling to hold all of the threads together, and even if he does not always succeed, the almost entirely successful attempt in this most original novel is nothing short of audacious.

A new world within our own where the art and science of "verticality" are respected and revered by society, and where their power in society attract organised crime, with an overlay of racism. An interesting construction, although a little artificial.

What we want here is a good clean fight, protect yourself at all times, no head butts, no hitting below the belt, break clenches when I tell you, after a knockdown go to the nearest neutral corner and wait until signaled, no limit on knockdowns in a round and you will not be saved by the bell. Shake hands and come out fighting. Colsen Whitehead could very well have been the third man in the ring of any fight, but this book is an exhibition bout, with no titles at risk.

The rudimentary level of stratification here is empiricists/intuitionists however, dependent on the reader's proclivities and breadth of knowledge, the story may equally as comfortably lend itself to a wide range of allegorical representations including feminism/ sexism, intolerance/inclusiveness, traditionalism/innovation, realists/post-modernists and in all likelihood a multitude of other contrasting viewpoints I have forgotten over the years since I read the novel.

The protagonist, Lila Mae Watson is an Intuitionist, an elevator inspector employing perception and insight as her primary tools for determination of an elevator's compliance with city code, as opposed to the Empiricists, the group of inspectors who value the service record (past experience), and documentable evidence (physical inspection of components) above all else. When an elevator Lila Mae has recently approved fails just as the mayor was about to dedicate the building, Lila Mae is placed in the position of scapegoat and undertakes to clear her name, restore her credibility and find out who or what was actually responsible for the mishap. Along the way, influenced to a great extent by a wide range of encounters with a mosaic of characters all possessing hidden personal agendas, Lila Mae arrives at a juncture where she has very little in common with the woman we met at the outset.

The Intuitionist is a novel of erudite conceptualization, elegant syntax and enticing mystery. It is suffused with sub-text and texture; it is surreal and timeless; but first and foremost, it is a book that should not be overlooked.

Elevators are the metaphor for progress - social, technological, economic. Using surrealism to obscure time and place, Colson Whitehead uses the elevator directions, up and down, to carry his agenda of racial inequality and it works surprisingly well.

Starting in a divided department of elevator inspectors, Whitehead plays the divisions for maximum tension - Intuitionists vs Empiricists, Minorities vs. Racists, Women vs. Sexists, Blue Collar vs. White. He plays the tensions and the conflicts musically in a book where the essentials seem real, but the structure is impossible. The city is a caricature of New York, perhaps at the turn of the century, but perhaps in modern times, or maybe in post-war industrialism, or it could be during the depression. At times the feeling transitions between those times with elements of all thrown in.

What this chronological surrealism does to the reader is prevent him or her from becoming complacent, keeping the setting unsure and gnawing at the edge of reason which keeps the mind sharp for the message that's being delivered. Also, by telling the story as a crime noir it keeps the racial inequality at the forefront, possible and shocking, but familiar at the same time. The protagonist, Lila Mae, the first black woman to be an Elevator Inspector steps through a minefield every day. She's an upstart, a minority in every possible way, Black, Woman, Intuitionist, Rookie, Intellectual. She personifies the new order, the higher level and the traditional white establishment doesn't want to rise to the levels of equality for all people, thoughts, and innovations.

There's a murder. She's blamed. We follow her as she keeps one step ahead of the investigation, finding out about herself while she investigates the reasons. She finds that there's a holy grail of elevators, a Black Box, that was theorized and perhaps realized by her idol, James Fulton. She joins this search as a way to both clear her name and vindicate her methods, her school of inspection.

The true knock I have with the book is that Whitehead was a bit ham-handed in his delivery. We got it and the story could've carried it without the preaching.

- CV Rick

I am a huge fan of Whitehead's first novel (The Intuitionist) and found his second (John Henry Days) flawed but well worth reading. This brief third work of fiction shares the themes of identity of the first book and the framework of the second. As in "John Henry Days", the story follows a polished, semi-hip, professional black New Yorker as he ventures to the hinterlands (here a small Midwesternish town) for a work assignment. It seems he's a specialist in naming products who has been hired to help the town figure out what its new name (if any) will be. As in "The Intuitionist", the plot serves as a canvas for Whitehead to ruminate on race, history, and identity in America.

However, the story is a little elusive throughout and combined with a the slow pacing, it often feels like Whitehead is just kind of noodling or riffing on his scenes and themes. Delivered in his distinctive prose, with plenty of humor, the story unfolds as a kind of allegory or fable. We learn that the protagonist -- who rather pointedly remains nameless -- used a bandaid to "hide the hurt" of a badly stubbed toe, only to have the wound fester and become badly infected. This mirrors the situation of the town, whose name changed from Freedom (per its founding by former slaves) to Winthrop (per the barbed-wire magnate whose invention brought prosperity to the place), and now, possibly, New Prospera (per the dot com which might revitalize the town) -- all of which mask another, darker, lost name. And ultimately, like the infected toe which must be amputated, the troublesome old name can't stay hidden forever. On yet another level, it's clear that the consultant's smooth exterior and bitter running commentary is a bandaid for his insecure, emotionally closed interior.

Satirizing advertising and consumer culture is more or less like shooting fish in a barrel, and while Whitehead does it well, that's fairly secondary to his central concerns of race, history, and identity. The story wraps up in a rather abrupt, anticlimactic manner -- but that's presumably the point. Perhaps somewhat slight and somewhat obvious, but well worth reading nonetheless.

Apex did for me what a good work of art should do: present an original idea in a whole new light. I enjoyed the author's theory that words don't always explain or shed light; they hide, obscure and diffuse clarity. I thought the protagonist was well-drawn and his insights were well presented. All in all, a book for people who enjoy words and the people who are employed to use them.

Colson Whitehead's "Apex Hides the Hurt: A Novel" is a slender, often witty, fictitious look at marketing and the nature of identity as seen primarily from an Afro-American perspective. Stylistically, it is much closer in tone to his first novel, "The Intuitionist" than to his second, "John Henry Days", replete with much of the same crisp, lyrical prose found in his first novel. As such, I regard "Apex Hides the Hurt: A Novel" as a brilliant example of allegorical fiction, in which Whitehead offers a funny, almost hysterical, satirical exploration of marketing. The hero, an Afro-American marketing expert known as a "nomenclature consultant", must find a suitable name for the town of Winthrop, founded by ex-slaves after the end of the Civil War. His encounters with the town's mayor, leading businessman and other citizens are often both hilarious and bizarre, leading our hero on a seemingly fruitless quest in search of the right name as the suitable replacement for Winthrop. No doubt Whitehead's latest will surely please his growing legion of fans.

When I finished this brilliant meditation on naming and essence, I thought about the untold hours that Colson Whitehead (like most of us) must have spent contemplating his own name. Is it a nom de plume? I don't think so, but then what isn't? As Apex Hides the Hurt makes painfully clear, names are temporary things, seldom expressing the essential truth. They hide the hurt, the suppurating wound that will eventually grow into an exotic, diverse company of organisms that requires surgery. Thinking about this wonderful book, images, names, and themes rise not just to the surface but to that apex where the exhilarating overview makes the reader forget disturbing, dislocated, lonely story that has just unfolded. The unnamed nomenclature consultant who narrates the story, a slob to whom names come all too easily, twitches with self-consciousness, casual and defensive cruelty, and a sort of intellectual righteous indignation masked by immersion in popular culture and simple desire for love that he knows he doesn't deserve. He's familiar. He has a great sense of humor, a finger on the cultural zeitgeist, and a voice that makes him as a brother with such illustrious forebears as Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, Richard Pryor, or Charles Johnson. His bitterness and his honesty are earned; his humor comes from a straightforward glimpse into the dark side of human nature.

The book goes down very easily, like a hip-hop commercial or a poem by Paul Beatty. It an amusing advertising novel, a light version of Toni Morrison's Paradise, a riff on The Great Gatsby, a post-modern sonata about syllables, names, and the human condition. It's mainly funny: you read it with mouth cocked between a sneer (at society, at us) and a grin. I'm eager to go back and read his other two novels.

I read Apex Hides the Hurt after hearing part of an interview with the author on NPR. Perhaps if I'd heard the entire interview I would have known better. The field of nomenclaure consultancy sounds intriguing and a good premise to explore how we are influenced by names of products and places. However, the protagonist is an un-named and un-likeable character. His musings do not lead to any enlightening insights, even though the author may think they do. This book's writing is very contrived. I consider this book self-centered and disappointing.

When I finished John Henry Days I felt that I wanted to know more about the title character. The most interesting chapters in this book were the historical ones. What was John Henry really like, what about Lil Bob, was John Henry's wife really Polly? The excerpt on Paul Robeson was also interesting. As for J., I too like Pamela was wondering what the J stands for?

I had to read this for a class. I just could not get into this story. I normally love to read but this book just could not cut it. I would not continue reading this book by choice. I will be glad to be done with it. The instructor could have picked a better book. No one else in the class cares for this book either. A waste of my money. J. is an annoying character. Couldn't care less about him....

Grandiose undertaking presented in a convoluted epic of a story. Whitehead writes parallel stories that engage and is presented in a straight-forward, albiet alternating fashion, until about half-way through the novel, where it seems he loses focus or becomes bored and starts interjecting a series of new sub-plots in alternating seccession in the guise of a contributing back-story, but in reality this takes away from the main story. Once it's over, a feeling of importance permeates, but for all the loose ends this feeling is diminished a bit.

JHD is too long, and it sometimes takes too much of a byroad to return to the main narrative. There is much beauty in those byways, but by the time you get back to J. and Pamela, you feel you've travelled too far to be happy about your return, and the two characters don't grip you like they could or should. What made The Intuitionist such a great book - the detailled accounts - is this novel's main flaw.

This is good too, although it took me a long time to actually finish it. It sat on the desk beside my bed for a few months, and, despite my best intentions, I read a few different books during that time while slightly avoiding this one. This one is a bit long, and at times I wondered if he's the sort of writer that people like to own more than they like to read.

But still, Whitehead is a force to be reckoned with. He writes like a white guy. There, I said it. More like Updike than Baldwin. That's what the hype is about. He's obviously a well read, educated brother that knows how to put words together. He throws up a fractured prism of thought and feedback and current from our culture. The result is quite interesting, although I'm sure this is not for everybody.

This little sort of tone poem captures some of the beauty and some of the meanness of New York life. I didn't come away from THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK as being negative toward the city, but even if Mr. Whitehead were, we New Yorkers need our cranks and curmudgeons. It makes us part of who we are, after all.

The free style works MOST of the time. When it doesn't, it really doesn't. (It is no coincidence that the most straight-forward section, the introduction, is the most superb!) THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK doesn't have the lyricism of E.B. White's THIS IS NEW YORK, but it doesn't pretend to want to be like it, anyway. Colson Whitehead's piece is more like Whitman's poetry, as he rambled along the old downtown streets and piers, and recorded his scenes and his feelings about them. Yes, this book could have been greater, but it doesn't take away from the power much of it has. So if you're looking for a history of or guidebook to New York City, this is not the book. But if you're looking for the evocative power of New York, written in a personal, lyrical style, you won't find many better than THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK.

Colson Whitehead's "The Colossus of New York" is a sort of prose poem to New York. But interestingly enough, the city's identity is almost incidental. New York could be any megalopolis. Whitehead simply uses it as a convenient dumping ground for heaping piles of metaphor, innuendo, and wry pseudo-Freudian slip-riffs. As Whitehead eventually says: "Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world." He even outdoes Iain Sinclair in this territory because, hey, "Colossus" is actually readable.

Whitehead sculpts sentences here with dazzling, fluid mastery. In sentence after sentence, he manages to surprise you, keeping you in gleeful suspense for that next line, and the next one... And yet it never feels overwrought or exhausting, probably because he pays equal attention to the rhythm of his prose (this is one of those books you can't help reading aloud).

Here's one of my many favorite passages, set in the subway system:

"This is the fabled journey through the underground, folks, and it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. On the opposite track it's a field of greener grass, you gotta beat trains off with a stick. From his secret booth the announcer scares and reassures alternatively. The postures on the platform sag or stiffen appropriately. With a dial controlling the amount of static. What are their rooms like, the men at the microphones. One day the fiscal importunities of the subway announcer's union will be exposed and that will be the end of the hot tubs and lobster, but until then they break out the bubbly. Look down the tunnel one more time and your behavior will describe a psychiatric disorder. It's infectious. They take turns looking down into darkness and the platform is a clock: the more people standing dumb, the more time has passed since the last train. The people fall from above into hourglass dunes. Collect like seconds."

I also recommend the audio book edition of this title, as Whitehead himself reads the thing in a dizzying performance. It's like a long shot of aggression with a beat-poetry rhythm and a helping of faux snottiness, all orchestrated to allow us to experience the idea of street-level New York in a manageable package.

The author writes negative comments about every subject, even about subjects he likes. Everything sounds bad in "his New York", as he calls it. I was very disappointed in this book because I really like NY. I read about half the book and threw it in the trash.

People that laud this type of 'work' are the type that can read something significant into anything because they don't want to admit that they don't get it. He tries to paint a picture of Gotham using mawkish free association which comes across as pseudo-intellect at its worst. I was really looking forward to this book because it sounded like a very cool exercise and interesting look into the greatest city on the planet. Hardbound pretentious excrement.

Colson Whitehead is a talented writer, as one can easily see in his first two novels. So when I read that he was writing nonfiction about New York, I was thrilled at the prospects. But I don't know what to make of this book.
The majority of the 13 parts have the same structure. Take a place. Write short sentences that explain what you would see at that place. Include actions and thoughts of those characters.
On paper, it sounds awful, and it some ways it is. It is the shortest 176 pages you will ever read, but this style gets highly repetitive. Rather than explaining why he chose these places or what they mean to him, Whitehead includes little about himself. There is quite simply zero insight into the soul of the city.
But the book does have its strong points. Whitehead's scenes are very evocative and I often found myself smiling and nodding at his dead-on descriptions of what I had seen in New York. He notices things about New York that you take for granted. At times, his skills shine through.
But it ultimately felt like reading a good writer's notes before he turns them in to an actual book. I wanted so much more from this book, and based on what is there (and also the wonderful first essay, which is different from all others in structure), I get the feeling it could be there. Everyone has their own version of New York and I'm still waiting to see how Whitehead really sees his hometown. Ultimately it reads like an astute but repetitive poem. Nonetheless, any book that makes me nostalgic about my trips to Port Authority has done one incredible job.