The Omni Americans

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The Omni-Americans

Author : Albert Murray
Publisher : Library of America
ISBN 13 : 1598536532
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (985 download)

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Book Synopsis The Omni-Americans by : Albert Murray

Download or read book The Omni-Americans written by Albert Murray and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rediscover the “most important book on black-white relationships” in America in a special 50th anniversary edition introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Walker Percy) “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people . . . Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.” These words, written by Albert Murray at the height of the Black Power movement, cut against the grain of their moment, and announced the arrival of a major new force in American letters. In his 1970 classic The Omni-Americans, Murray took aim at protest writers and social scientists who accentuated the “pathology” of race in American life. Against narratives of marginalization and victimhood, Murray argued that black art and culture, particularly jazz and blues, stand at the very headwaters of the American mainstream, and that much of what is best in American art embodies the “blues-hero tradition”—a heritage of grace, wit, and inspired improvisation in the face of adversity. Reviewing The Omni-Americans in 1970, Walker Percy called it “the most important book on black-white relationships . . . indeed on American culture . . . published in this generation.” As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. makes clear in his introduction, Murray’s singular poetic voice, impassioned argumentation, and pluralistic vision have only become more urgently needed today.

The Omni-Americans

Author : Albert Murray
Publisher : E.P. Dutton
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Omni-Americans by : Albert Murray

Download or read book The Omni-Americans written by Albert Murray and published by E.P. Dutton. This book was released on 1970 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Omni-Americans is a classic collection of wickedly incisive essays, commentaries, and reviews on politics, literature, and music. Provocative and compelling, Albert Murray debunks the "so-called findings and all-too-inclusive extrapolations of social science survey technicians," contending that "human nature is no less complex and fascinating for being encased in dark skin." His claim that blacks have produced "the most complicated culture, and therefore the most complicated sensibility in the western world" is elucidated in a book which, according to Walker Percy, "fits no ideology, resists all abstractions, offends orthodox liberals and conservatives, attacks social scientists and Governor Wallace in the same breath, sees all the faults of the country, and holds out hope in the end."

Stomping the Blues

Author : Albert Murray
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452956154
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Stomping the Blues by : Albert Murray

Download or read book Stomping the Blues written by Albert Murray and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic work of American music writing, renowned critic Albert Murray argues beautifully and authoritatively that “the blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance.” In Stomping the Blues Murray explores its history, influences, development, and meaning as only he can. More than two hundred vintage photographs capture the ambiance Murray evokes in lyrical prose. Only the sounds are missing from this lyrical, sensual tribute to the blues.

South to a Very Old Place

Author : Albert Murray
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307828611
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis South to a Very Old Place by : Albert Murray

Download or read book South to a Very Old Place written by Albert Murray and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-09-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highly acclaimed novelist and biographer Albert Murray tells his classic memoir of growing up in Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s in South to a Very Old Place. Intermingling remembrances of youth with engaging conversation, African-American folklore, and astute cultural criticism, it is at once an intimate personal journey and an incisive social history, informed by "the poet's language, the novelist's sensibility, the essayist's clarity, the jazzman's imagination, the gospel singer's depth of feeling" (The New Yorker). "His perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor and its tenacious hold on the intellect...[It] destroys some fashionable socio-political interpretations of growing up black."--Toni Morrison, The New York Times Book Review

The Hero And the Blues

Author : Albert Murray
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307828654
Total Pages : 114 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The Hero And the Blues by : Albert Murray

Download or read book The Hero And the Blues written by Albert Murray and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-09-19 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this visionary book, Murray takes an audacious new look at black music and, in the process, succeeds in changing the way one reads literature. Murray's subject is the previously unacknowledged kinship between fiction and the blues. Both, he argues, are virtuoso performances that impart information, wisdom, and moral guidance to their audiences; both place a high value on improvisation; and both fiction and the blues create a delicate balance between the holy and the obscene, essential human values and cosmic absurdity. Encompassing artists from Ernest Hemingway to Duke Ellington, and from Thomas Mann to Richard Wright, The Hero and the Blues pays homage to a new black aesthetic.

Bones

Author : Elaine Dewar
Publisher : Vintage Canada
ISBN 13 : 0307375552
Total Pages : 642 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

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Book Synopsis Bones by : Elaine Dewar

Download or read book Bones written by Elaine Dewar and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-03-04 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists not so long ago unanimously believed that people first walked to the New World from northeast Asia across the Bering land bridge at the end of the Ice Age 11,000 years ago. But in the last ten years, new tools applied to old bones have yielded evidence that tells an entirely different story. In Bones, Elaine Dewar records the ferocious struggle in the scientific world to reshape our views of prehistory. She traveled from the Mackenzie River valley in northern Canada to the arid plains of the Brazilian state of Piaui, from the skull-and-bones-lines offices of the Smithsonian Institution to the basement lab of an archaeologist in Washington State who wondered if the FBI was going to come for him. She met scientists at war with each other and sought to see for herself the oldest human remains on these continents. Along the way, she found that the old answer to the question of who were the First Americans was steeped in the bitter tea of racism. Bones explores the ambiguous terrain left behind when a scientific paradigm is swept away. It tells the stories of the archaeologists, Native American activists, DNA experts and physical anthropologists scrambling for control of ancient bones of Kennewick Man, Spirit Cave, and the oldest one of all, a woman named Luzia. At stake are professional reputations, lucrative grants, fame, vindication, even the reburial of wandering spirits. The weapons? Lawsuits, threats, violence. The battlefield stretches from Chile to Alaska. Dewar tells the stories that never find their way into scientific papers — stories of mysterious deaths, of the bones of evil shamen and the shadows falling on the lives of scientists who pulled them from the ground. And she asks the new questions arising out of the science of bones and the stories of first peoples: "What if Native Americans are right in their belief that they have always been in the Americas and did not migrate to the New World at the end of the Ice Age? What if the New World's human story is as long and complicated as that of the Old? What if the New World and the Old World have always been one?"

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Author : Michael Pollan
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143038583
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (43 download)

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Book Synopsis The Omnivore's Dilemma by : Michael Pollan

Download or read book The Omnivore's Dilemma written by Michael Pollan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-08-28 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Outstanding . . . a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our eating habits." —The New Yorker One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year and Winner of the James Beard Award Author of This is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind and the #1 New York Times Bestseller In Defense of Food and Food Rules What should we have for dinner? Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Ten years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.

2 A.M. in Little America

Author : Ken Kalfus
Publisher : Milkweed Editions
ISBN 13 : 1571317732
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (713 download)

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Book Synopsis 2 A.M. in Little America by : Ken Kalfus

Download or read book 2 A.M. in Little America written by Ken Kalfus and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Americans flee widespread civil conflict, one young refugee ekes out a living in a suspenseful, darkly comic novel: “An important writer in every sense.” —David Foster Wallace An Esquire “Best Book of Spring 2022” A Literary Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2022” A San Francisco Chronicle “Most Anticipated Novel of 2022” In the future, sweeping civil disorder has forced America’s young people to flee its borders into an unwelcoming world. One such American is Ron Patterson, who finds himself on distant shores, working as a repairman and sharing a room with other refugees. In an unnamed city wedged between ocean and lush mountainous forest, Ron can almost imagine a stable life for himself. Especially when he makes the first friend he’s had in years—a mysterious migrant named Marlise, who bears a striking resemblance to a onetime classmate. Nearly a decade later—after anti-migrant sentiment has put their whirlwind intimacy and asylum to an end—Ron is living in “Little America,” an enclave of migrants in one of the few countries still willing to accept them. Here, among reminders of his past life, he again begins to feel that he may have found a home. He adopts a stray dog, observes his neighbors, and lands a new repairman job that allows him to move through the city quietly. But this newfound security, too, is quickly jeopardized, as resurgent political divisions threaten the fabric of Little America. Tapped as an informant against the rise of militant gangs and contending with the appearance of a strangely familiar woman, Ron is suddenly on dangerous and uncertain ground. Brimming with mystery, suspense, and Ken Kalfus’s distinctive comic irony, 2 A.M. in Little America poses questions vital to the current moment: What happens when privilege is reversed? Who is watching and why? How do tribalized politics disrupt our ability to distinguish what is true and what is not? This is a story for our time—gripping, unsettling, prescient—by an acclaimed National Book Award finalist. “My favorite book by one of America’s great living writers.” —Jonathan Safran Foer “A provocative dystopian story . . . takes hold of the reader.” —Publishers Weekly “A highly readable, taut novel.” —The New York Times Book Review “One of contemporary literature’s best-kept secrets.” —Esquire

America, We Need to Talk

Author : Joel Berg
Publisher : Seven Stories Press
ISBN 13 : 1609807308
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (98 download)

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Book Synopsis America, We Need to Talk by : Joel Berg

Download or read book America, We Need to Talk written by Joel Berg and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The newest book by Joel Berg--an internationally recognized leader and media spokesman in the fields of hunger, poverty, food systems, and U.S. politics, and the director of Hunger Free America--America We Need to Talk: A Self-Help Book for the Nation is both a parody of relationship and self-help books and a serious analysis of the nation's political and economic dysfunction. Explaining that the most serious--and most broken--relationship is the one between us, as Americans, and our nation, the book explains how, no matter who becomes our next president, average Joes can channel their anger at our hobbled system into concrete actions that will fix our democracy, rebuild our middle class, and restore our stature in the world as a beacon of freedom and hope. Starting with the belief that it's irresponsible for Americans to blame the nation's problems solely on "the politicians" or "the system," Joel makes a case for how it's the personal responsibility of every resident of this country to fix it. The American people are in a relationship with their government and their society, and, as in all relationships, it's the responsibility of both sides to recognize and repair their problems.

The Seven League Boots

Author : Albert Murray
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307828646
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The Seven League Boots by : Albert Murray

Download or read book The Seven League Boots written by Albert Murray and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-09-19 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The break-out novel by an unrecognized master--"a fictional tale spinner in the grand Southern tradition" (Washington Post Book World). Told from the point of view of a young Alabama college graduate in the 1920s, this brilliant novel recounts the exploits of a legendary jazz composer and his band on a tour that becomes a heroic journey "equivalent to the seven league strides of heroes in rocking chair story times."

Trading Twelves

Author : Ralph Ellison
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307560740
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (75 download)

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Book Synopsis Trading Twelves by : Ralph Ellison

Download or read book Trading Twelves written by Ralph Ellison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-04-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This absorbing collection of letters spans a decade in the lifelong friendship of two remarkable writers who engaged the subjects of literature, race, and identity with deep clarity and passion. The correspondence begins in 1950 when Ellison is living in New York City, hard at work on his enduring masterpiece, Invisible Man, and Murray is a professor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Mirroring a jam session in which two jazz musicians "trade twelves"—each improvising twelve bars of music around the same musical idea-their lively dialog centers upon their respective writing, the jazz they both love so well, on travel, family, the work literary contemporaries (including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway) and the challenge of racial inclusiveness that they wish to pose to America through their craft. Infused with warmth, humor, and great erudition, Trading Twelves offers a glimpse into literary history in the making—and into a powerful and enduring friendship.

Train Whistle Guitar

Author : Albert Murray
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 9780375703362
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (33 download)

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Book Synopsis Train Whistle Guitar by : Albert Murray

Download or read book Train Whistle Guitar written by Albert Murray and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His schoolteacher, the barber, older girls, and a train-hopping musician teach Scooter just about all he needs to know in Gasoline Point, Alabama, during the 1920s.

The Magic Keys

Author : Albert Murray
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307428958
Total Pages : 187 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis The Magic Keys by : Albert Murray

Download or read book The Magic Keys written by Albert Murray and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Magic Keys winningly evokes the coming to maturity of one of the great characters in contemporary American literature: Scooter, the central protagonist of Albert Murray’ s highly acclaimed autobiographical novels Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, and The Seven League Boots. Growing up brilliant and curious in Alabama, Scooter was told he was destined for greatness. Now newly married and a graduate student in humanities at New York University, he goes about discovering just what he is destined to be great at. Anchored by Eunice, his “Mrs. Me,” Scooter makes the rounds of Manhattan’ s libraries, jazz hangouts, galleries, skyscrapers, and endlessly fascinating streets, meeting the people who will help him find his way: dapper Taft Edison, who is setting their down-home dialect onto the pages of his novel-in-progress; Joe States, a drummer who brings old expectations to Scooter’s new life; and Jewel Templeton, no longer his girl but still a believer. When his budding career takes him back to Alabama, Scooter discovers both the promise of everyday bliss and intimations of adventures to come. In his inimitably musical, ardent prose, Murray captures the joyful rhythms of youth and the pulse of life at the moment when everything seems possible, in an exhilarating, tender, and masterfully crafted novel.

Honor Before Glory

Author : Scott McGaugh
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 : 0306824469
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (68 download)

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Book Synopsis Honor Before Glory by : Scott McGaugh

Download or read book Honor Before Glory written by Scott McGaugh and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On October 24, 1944, more than two hundred American soldiers realized they were surrounded by German infantry deep in the mountain forest of eastern France. As their dwindling food, ammunition, and medical supplies ran out, the American commanding officer turned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team to achieve what other units had failed to do. Honor Before Glory is the story of the 442nd, a segregated unit of Japanese American citizens, commanded by white officers, that finally rescued the "lost battalion." Their unmatched courage and sacrifice under fire became legend-all the more remarkable because many of the soldiers had volunteered from prison-like "internment" camps where sentries watched their mothers and fathers from the barbed-wire perimeter. In seven campaigns, these young Japanese American men earned more than 9,000 Purple Hearts, 6,000 Bronze and Silver Stars, and nearly two dozen Medals of Honor. The 442nd became the most decorated unit of its size in World War II: its soldiers earned 18,100 awards and decorations, more than one for every man. Honor Before Glory is their story-a story of a young generation's fight against both the enemy and American prejudice-a story of heroism, sacrifice, and the best America has to offer.

The Imperial Middle

Author : Benjamin DeMott
Publisher : William Morrow
ISBN 13 : 9781557100238
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis The Imperial Middle by : Benjamin DeMott

Download or read book The Imperial Middle written by Benjamin DeMott and published by William Morrow. This book was released on 1990 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the concept of America as a classless society and reveals the social and political problems associated with the myth

What It Is

Author : Clifford Thompson
Publisher : Other Press, LLC
ISBN 13 : 1590519051
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (95 download)

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Book Synopsis What It Is by : Clifford Thompson

Download or read book What It Is written by Clifford Thompson and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An African-American writer's concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in twenty-first-century America. In the tradition of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me comes Clifford Thompson's What It Is. Thompson was raised to believe in treating every person of every color as an individual, and he decided as a young man that America, despite its history of racial oppression, was his home as much as anyone else's. As a middle-aged, happily married father of biracial children, Thompson finds himself questioning his most deeply held convictions when the race-baiting Donald Trump ascends to the presidency—elected by whites, whom Thompson had refused to judge as a group, and who make up the majority in this country Thompson had called his own. In the grip of contradictory emotions, Thompson turns for guidance to the wisdom of writers he admires while knowing that the answers to his questions about America ultimately lie in America itself. Through interviews with a small but varied group of Americans he hears sharply divergent opinions about what is happening in the country while trying to find his own answers—conclusions based not on conventional wisdom or on what he would like to believe, but on what he sees.

Murray Talks Music

Author : Albert Murray
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452951551
Total Pages : 455 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Murray Talks Music by : Albert Murray

Download or read book Murray Talks Music written by Albert Murray and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year 2016 will mark the centennial of the birth of Albert Murray (1916–2013), who in thirteen books was by turns a lyrical novelist, a keen and iconoclastic social critic, and a formidable interpreter of jazz and blues. Not only did his prizewinning study Stomping the Blues (1976) influence musicians far and wide, it was also a foundational text for Jazz at Lincoln Center, which he cofounded with Wynton Marsalis and others in 1987. Murray Talks Music brings together, for the first time, many of Murray’s finest interviews and essays on music—most never before published—as well as rare liner notes and prefaces. For those new to Murray, this book will be a perfect introduction, and those familiar with his work—even scholars—will be surprised, dazzled, and delighted. Highlights include Dizzy Gillespie’s richly substantive 1985 conversation; an in-depth 1994 dialogue on jazz and culture between Murray and Wynton Marsalis; and a long 1989 discussion on Duke Ellington between Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Loren Schoenberg. Also interviewed by Murray are producer and impresario John Hammond and singer and bandleader Billy Eckstine. All of thse conversations were previously lost to history. A celebrated educator and raconteur, Murray engages with a variety of scholars and journalists while making insightful connections among music, literature, and other art forms—all with ample humor and from unforeseen angles. Leading Murray scholar Paul Devlin contextualizes the essays and interviews in an extensive introduction, which doubles as a major commentary on Murray’s life and work. The volume also presents sixteen never-before-seen photographs of jazz greats taken by Murray. No jazz collection will be complete without Murray Talks Music, which includes a foreword by Gary Giddins and an afterword by Greg Thomas.