Going Too Far
Essays About America's Nervous Breakdown
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Challenging a prevailing attitude, this account disputes the idea that racism is no longer a factor in American life. Based on cultural and literary evidence—including Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn—it argues that, in some ways, the United States very much resembles the country of the 1850s. Not only are the representations of blacks in popular culture throwbacks to the days of minstrelsy, but politicians are also raising stereotypes reminiscent of those which fugitive slaves found it necessary to combat: that African Americans are lazy, dependent, and in need of management. Bold and direct, this book brings an important debate to the surface.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of previously published essays, interviews, and skits, poet, novelist, and essayist Reed (Another Day at the Front) takes the opportunity to let off steam about issues both social (the persistence of racism) and personal (his Internet brawl with Salon.com's Joan Walsh over an op-ed column he wrote for the New York Times). Reed tackles the Tea Party's shockingly racist antics, Obama's accomplishments, feminism's effect on the black male image, the Occupy Movement to varying results. Reed is best when he historicizes, as in his essay "Ethnic Studies in the Age of the Tea Party," and when he draws on the more rational, even-tempered voices of others, as in his interviews with Terry McMillan and Nuruddin Farah. But when he does what he sets out to do go too far he is at his worst, as in his scathing essays on the film Precious. Many readers will find some affinity with Reed's work, but his rhetoric can be too inflammatory (he calls Tea Partiers the "T-shirts" "America's equivalent of Hitler's Brown Shirts," and derides "wealthy white progressive women") to comfortably digest which, presumably, is exactly as Reed would have it.
