Word: rapists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...BULLINS has written more than 30 plays, served as Minister of Culture for the Black Panthers, won an Obie award, and spent a lot of time hustling in the street. He's also just written his first novel, The Reluctant Rapist, an imaginatively structured but sadly shallow portrait of ghetto life...
Steve Benson, the protagonist in the brilliant The Duplex, once again serves as the focus of Bullins's work and as he skillfully juggles the novel's first and third person voices, Bullins leaves little doubt that he is Steve and that The Reluctant Rapist is his only slightly fictionalized autobiography. A picaresque tale of horror and beauty, failure and success, the novel begins with a street scene in Watts and in a series of flashbacks recalls Steve's--Bullins's life journey, a peregrination motivated by "the memory of the past, of his wasted years from where he came...
...women. Women are seen as sexual objects and survival of the male ego becomes dependent on crushing the female's. "You sonna bitch," Velma, the lonely housewife Steve seduces and mistreats in The Duplex, curses. "You're a sonna bitch," the first black woman he rapes in The Reluctant Rapist cries out as he defiles her. But instead of being offended by the epithets, he wears them boldly as though they were testimonials to his manliness. For Bullins the only law that operates between man and woman is the law of the jungle as he, the ferocious lion, preys upon...
...play The Reluctant Rapist would hold up very well. Bullins's sparse and direct prose reads more like stage directions in setting the scenes for his characters to deliver their earthy and vivid verbal banterings that make up the bulk of the work. But as a novel The Reluctant Rapist fails; it's characterizations shabby and incomplete, its treatment of the complexities of ghetto life simplistic...
...Girl-Next-Door June Allyson, Novelist Nelson Algren, Psychologist Erich Fromm, Automation Millionaire John Diebold, Folk Singer Burl Ives and Mr. America himself, Bert Parks? Scrubbed out of the 1973 Celebrity Register, for one thing. Instead, publiciety's decennial Almanach de Gotha includes for the first time Rapist Eldridge Cleaver, Lesbian Jill Johnston, Red Black Angela Davis, Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, and Senator Thomas Eagleton. For readers anxious to achieve such status, Microsociologist Cleveland Amory, in a foreword to the new edition, passes on some advice. The way to become a celebrity, said Aristotle Onassis, who ought to know...