Dr. King's Refrigerator
And Other Bedtime Stories
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From National Book Award–winning author Charles Johnson comes a sly, witty, and insightful collection of short stories exploring issues of race and identity.
In “Sweet Dreams,” a Kafkaesque tale is set in a world where dreams are taxed—a reality that leads to a man and his dreamlife being audited. In “Cultural Relativity,” a young woman falls in love with the son of the president of an African nation—but is forbidden to ever kiss him. A deeply humane story, “Dr. King's Refrigerator” offers a remarkable glimpse into Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and his refrigerator. “Kwoon” is a graceful and illuminating story about a martial arts teacher on Chicago's South Side.
Compassionate and amusing, thought-provoking and richly imagined, Dr. King's Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories is a wonderful and compelling collection from one of America's most beloved authors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sages squabble, philosophers deliberate and kings dream in this collection of eight short stories by National Book Award winner Johnson (Middle Passage, etc.). Like fairy tales for policy-minded grownups, the stories revolve around ethical and philosophical decision making. In "Executive Decisions," the head of a Seattle company ponders which of two candidates to hire for an important post. The easy favorite is a white woman, capable and personable; the other contender is a tense, watchful black man, who knows "firsthand and through research... the contributions from people of color." In the end, the narrator's decision hinges on a revelation about the role of a black woman in his own white father's past. Though wooden in conception (like many of these stories), the tale comes to life at its ambiguous ending. Johnson's longer, more carefully fleshed out stories are most effective. In "The Gift of the Osuo," the king of a 17th-century African tribe is given a magic chalk that allows him to draw anything and make it come to life. The things he draws resemble "not the Real, but the Real transfigured," and it's the magic of this vision that transforms an otherwise ordinary fable. The didactic flatness of most of the other entries including the title story, in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. finds inspiration in lettuce and grapefruit isn't quite obscured by occasional bursts of inventive language and insight.
