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In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady." Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life, he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
Two girls who grow up to become women...two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret.
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida, even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces: a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.
Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady." Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life, he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
Two girls who grow up to become women...two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret.
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida, even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces: a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.
Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child - the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment - weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape and misshape the life of the adult.
He's successful, kind, and sensitive - the type of man every woman wants. And truck driver Calvin Ramsey just loves women - especially the lonely, unappreciated ones he meets online, like Lola Poole. His deceitful ex-wife taught him that women really appreciate someone who cares about their deepest feelings and problems.
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but 18 years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
A solid marriage, a thriving business, and the esteem of their close-knit Alabama community - Joyce and Odell Watson have every reason to count their blessings. Their marriage has given well-off Joyce a chance at the family she's always wanted - and granted Odell a once-in-a-lifetime shot to escape grinding poverty. But all that respectability and status comes at a cost. Just once, Joyce and Odell want to break loose and taste life's wild side, without consequences.
It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. This is a deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.
Best friends Nora, Darleen, and Andrea have one thing in common: They hustle by any means necessary. Money is never a problem for these sexy, big and beautiful women, and neither is getting a man. Darleen doesn't really like her current occupation, but she loves the money she makes from doing it. What happens when an out-of-work Darleen devises a plan to rob her former boss? Can she manage to push a different kind of weight, or will she need to call in reinforcements?
Sometimes going hard means sacrificing the very thing you love the most in order to be at the top. Gwen knows firsthand about this sacrifice as she struggles to get her son back from a heartless killer bent on revenge. Niya, on the other hand, is sitting at the top of the throne. Still, she will have to determine whether she’s willing to sacrifice her girls’ lives in order to make MHB a dominant force in North Carolina’s drug trade. She’s about to find out that playing with the big boys has its consequences, unless you are really about that life.
Today - as repeated attempts to “fix ourselves and our lives” fail - many of us face unprecedented fears about the future, struggle with unspeakable life tragedies, and sink under the belief that certain lives do not matter in our society. Others confront our epidemic of anxiety with fierce resistance, or “the fight to be right”, criticizing anyone and everyone just to end up stuck. In the face of such pervasive human suffering, New York Times best-selling author and legendary life coach Iyanla Vanzant challenges us: What if it’s not them - what if it’s you?
When Claudette McPhearson died, she left eight foster children to fend for themselves after they discovered the truth about her secret life. She was the leader of the Syndicate, a criminal enterprise that had a stronghold on the underworld. Much to her children's chagrin, it was up to one of them to step up and take the lead.
Welcome to the South, where women are raised to be mothers and wives, and to stand by their man no matter what. It's a place where, if you're a size eight, you're too small. When Niya, the head of MHB (Money-Hungry Bitches), decided to put her family's future first, nothing and nobody else mattered. You were either going to stand behind her or be the one standing on the other end of her gun. Any and every nigga known to get money in North Carolina was a target. MHB began as a small movement but quickly became an organization. See how Southern hospitality can become deadly.
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites listeners into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her - from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it - in her own words and on her own terms.
In Paradise, Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There...where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose."
Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.
I read Paradise with my book club. Many had a difficult times making sense of it. I had to listen twice myself. There are a lot characters and it is difficult to keep up with who is who. Over all it was an interestingly bizarre story that introduces you to the strangest group of people. Morrison did make me curious about all these troubled people but it disappointed me by ending so with many unanswered questions.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Morrison reading her own words gives deeper depth to the story. The attitudes of each character come forth from her deliberate cadence. It's so worth the 25 bucks.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
Not well spent because the story was abridged. I like to read the books alongside of the text. The author kept skipping over segments of the book.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Paradise?
The opening of the book will capture the listener/reader. "They shoot the white girl first."
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Toni Morrison?
The author is the best reader for the project.
Could you see Paradise being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?
I would love to see it in film.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
For some reason or another Morrison does not want to read all that she has written. It makes it difficult to follow along with the text, as she skips paragraphs at a time. The confusing thing is if she did not like these lines why write them?
Same version of book so I was planning on reading it and listening at same time but the audio is different from the book
Would you try another book from Toni Morrison and/or Toni Morrison?
I was very disappointed in the reading of this book, she does not go word for word and even skips paragraphs and pages of the detailed information which made this EXTREMMELY HARD TO FOLLOW, AS if this story was not hard enough to catch on to. Needless to say I made it half way through and gave up entirely, not even curious how it ends because the end is in the 1st sentence. She seems brilliant as I heard her speak in an interview apparently she was simply a bit over my head.
I just wish it was read word for word and not skipping around. But I enjoyed it.
I really really enjoyed this novel, and listening to the author read it was great.
I had to listen twice because the ending was confusing. Overall a good book though. Leisure reading, might have been better to physically read.
Would you try another book from Toni Morrison and/or Toni Morrison?
no
What was most disappointing about Toni Morrison’s story?
For some reason I got this to listen as I read along for my enlgish class and the story teller skipped from sentences all the way to a page. I was very disappointed.
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Toni Morrison?
yes
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
anger
Any additional comments?
pretty disappointed the story wasn't read word for word. I wasn't able to do my homework like I'd of liked to..
1 of 2 people found this review helpful