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Books by Arthur Flowers
De Mojo Blues
/ Another Good Loving Blues
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Cleveland Lee's Beale Street Band
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Reviews of
Another Good Loving Blues
A Novel by Arthur Flowers
What
do you get when you add a blues piano player, an Arkansas
conjure woman, the Mississippi Delta and the 1920s?
Another Good Loving Blues and the "sound and soul of southern
folks."
A
charming, provocative novel in which Mr. Flowers seamlessly
blends the rich rhythms of the blues and a Deep South patois in
a lyrical, literate style.—Publisher
In
prose which evokes the blues lyrics that provide this novel's
background, Flowers ( De Mojo Blues ) tells a prepossessing
modern fable about loyalty in the sonorous voice of a
third-person narrator, a "griot" (storyteller) also
named Flowers. This alternately playful and solemn tale focuses
on the love between Lucas Bodeen, a suave, piano-playing
bluesman, and Melvira Dupree, a stubborn conjure woman. In 1919
they leave the Mississippi Delta for Memphis, on a "hoodoo
mission" to locate Melvira's elusive mother, but before
finding her they're drawn to rollicking, jazz-infected Beale
Street, a stopping point for many hopeful Southern blacks on
their way north. The
author downplays Beale Street's violence, drugs and prostitution
in favor of its lively atmosphere and the creative people, who
in his view make up a trustworthy, cooperative
"tribe." Flowers's characters lead by example: Bodeen,
though inclined to wallow in the blues, kicks his whiskey habit,
while Melvira looks for ways to help rather than harm with her
dangerous magic. Skeptics will find that good luck prevails
rather too frequently here; nevertheless, this is a spirited
effort, one that even includes a cameo by the young Zora Neale
Hurston.—Publishers
Weekly
In a style
that flows as smoothly as the music that forms its core, Flowers
( De Mojo Blues , Dutton, 1986. o.p.) has woven a fable of the
South that captures the heart of the blues musician as few
others have done before. "Every good man needs a real good
woman," sings bluesman Lucas Bodeen at the height of his
passion for Melvira Dupree, a conjurer in Sweetwater, Arkansas.
But Lucas temporarily loses sight of his need and his love when
subjected to the fast life and temptations of Memphis's Beale
Street.
How Lucas and
Melvira pursue separate quests but manage eventually to find
each other and to reconcile their love form a pretty, if
predictable, tale bordering on fantasy. Flowers, himself a
native Memphis blues singer, has captured the time and place to
perfection. Readers interested in this culture will be
fascinated.—Library
Journal.
Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib.
A
blues-playing pianist tries to hold on to the conjurewoman he
loves as she searches for her long-lost mother, in an odyssey
across a blues country flavored by a gumbo of different voices
and histories. 15,000 first printing. $10,000 ad/promo.—Ingram
It's Beale
Street in Memphis in the age when jazz was spelled "jass"
and ragtime was just a glint in Scott Joplin's eye. Lucas Bodeen
is the bluesman, and Melvira Dupree is the conjure woman he
loves. But pitted against them are all the forces of nature, the
clashing of their own stubborn wills, and a society mired in the
laws of Jim Crow and the mob.
Combining the
ancient African storytelling art of the griot with the American
offshoots of blues and hoodoo, Arthur Flowers sings us a story
that makes us smile - a story of life, and how love and
happiness really happen.—The
New York Times Book Review
posted Fall 2002
Arthur
Flowers, a Memphis native, is the author of two novels,
De Mojo Blues and Another Good Loving Blues (Ballantine Books), and a children's story,
Cleveland Lee's Beale Street Band. He is a
Vietnam veteran, blues singer, co-founder of the New Renaissance
Writer's Guild. In addition, he is the webmaster of Rootsblog:
A Cyberhoodoo Webspace and a performance artist whose presentation, Delta Oracle: A Griot
Speaks in Tongues, keeps him busy and Professor of MFA Fiction at Syracuse University.* * *
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Michelle Alexander: US Prisons, The New Jim Crow
/
Judge Mathis Weighs in on the execution of Troy Davis
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
By
Michelle
Alexander
The
mass incarceration of people of color through the War on
Drugs is a big part of the reason that a black child
born today is less likely to be raised by both parents
than a black child born during slavery. The absence of
black fathers from families across America is not simply
a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time
watching Sports Center. Hundreds of thousands of black
men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away
for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed
by whites. Most people seem to
imagine that the drug war—which has swept millions of
poor people of color behind bars—has been aimed at
rooting out drug kingpins or violent drug offenders.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This war has
been focused overwhelmingly on low-level drug offenses,
like marijuana possession—the very crimes that happen
with equal frequency in middle class white communities.
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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update 28 July 2008
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