Word: jimming
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...vicious” as the Concord Library Committee so notoriously did (and the New York Times reported) in 1885, but many still echo the concerns about racism the NAACP first presented in the 1950s—particularly with respect to Huck’s traveling companion, the runaway slave Jim...
Nancy Rawles, who won an American Book Award for her 1998 novel, Love Like Gumbo, has built her latest book, My Jim, upon this controversial character. “Upon,” and not “about,” is the right word: Rawles takes Jim less as the subject than as the starting point of a narrative dominated by the strong-willed women who tell it. In fact, although the book jacket proclaims My Jim a “nuanced critique of the great American novel,” it makes little direct contact with Twain?...
...book consists of what Marianne’s grandmother tells her. The story is knit loosely together by a number of objects Sadie possesses, loses, and, in some cases, finds again—a knife, a Congo bowl with magical healing properties, a hat dear to her Jim, a child’s tooth, a prized button. It is convincing and compelling as an oral narrative, most moving and successful where it most closely approximates direct speech (“You close your eyes and feel our love coming up behind you,” Sadie tells Marianne...
...thing is sure: My Jim is not likely to touch off anything like the controversy its predecessor did—or, for that matter, that Alice Randall did with her 2001 book The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Margaret Mitchell’s classic. While there is historical usefulness and emotional impact in every such account of the horrors of slavery, the episodes Rawles describes are, unfortunately, relatively familiar, as are the theoretical arguments for and against the kinds of linguistic and rhetorical techniques she employs (which Richard Wright first dismissed in Zora Neale Hurston...
...with Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas has become. His complaint could serve as a harsh but not wholly inaccurate description of Rawles’ book. Rawles—or perhaps those marketing her—seem to have failed to recognize that the moral complexities My Jim purports to expose are already present in Huck’s own narrative. While Rawles has provided a reasonably interesting supplement to Twain’s book, her “nuanced critique” articulates few moral problems that weren’t already implicit in the work...