Word: morrisons
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Jazz, the latest book by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Toni Morrison, is definitively the story of the City, of the twenties and of jazz, the music that gave voice to the African-American experience...
With a few exceptions such as Ralph Ellison, writers white and Black have used jazz as formula for cheap "atmosphere." Morrison rises above his temptation. There is no explicit jazz anywhere in this novel, no over-romantic images of saxophones and speak-easies. Instead, jazz is transmuted into narrative voice--a voice that at times surges poetically, at times sounds like a newsreel, at times is all-knowing...
...moment, this "moment in our century we assumed we understood." "If Booker T. was sitting down to eat a chicken sandwich in the President's house in a city called capital, near where True Belle had had such a good time, then things must be all right, all right." Morrison unravels the underside of the jazz age, complicating what we recall as a wildly uninhibited feel-good era. "Things" were not "all right"; history was not "over...
Beloved, Toni Morrison's best-known work, depicts the direct effect of slavery on the lives of a mother and her children who escape the antebellum South. Jazz is about the children of those children, and while they have not lived under slavery, they have lived with its legacy...
...exploring the psychological consequences of slavery in a relatively peaceful period in our country's history, Morrison demonstrates that the World Wars are not the only horrors of the twentieth century. Slavery has not been left behind in the nineteenth century, and its spiritual repercussions still have the power to immobilize and destroy lives...