Word: ishmael
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...from there. The book is a junkyard for the left-over bits and pieces of American myths that couldn't quite be worked into The System; interesting how you often learn more about people from the stuff they throw away than from what they admit to keeping. Ishmael Reed has taken assorted scraps and shavings from American history, religion, and polities and made of them a tale that at first sounds like a child's nightmare of shadows and misconceptions. But by the time you finish, it's no longer so childish...
...know much about Ishmael Reed, but from reading his book. I imagine he'd make an incredibly good drunk. His writing is like that, sky high and reeling along, everything just enough out of focus so that you get the feeling he's tilted the whole world a few degrees his way and he's letting you in on what he sees. What you see and what you don't is up to your imagination. Reed has a lot to say about what he thinks this country has been up to in the past 200 years...
...book, but try not to think too hard about what he's got to say; enjoy the images he puts you on to, and the pictures that get conjured up in your head. You'll like it a lot more that way, and the message, with the inevitability of Ishmael Reed's hangover, will come later...
...task of achieving a real peace promises to be infinitely more protracted. After years of futile, ruinous enmity toward Israel, the Arabs conceivably might decide that their best hope for the future lies in neighborly relations between the heirs of Isaac and Ishmael. More probably, envenomed by their latest defeat, they could embark on a new orgy of irredentist fervor, thereby proving once more, as Radio Algiers put it last week, that "the only language between Israel and the Arabs is the language of iron and fire...
...Ishmael is traditionally considered the ancestor of the Arabs, Isaac of the Jews...