I Can Read! A Book(s) Review

I have a special treat for my reader because I have actually enjoyed a three hour long nap this afternoon and feel awesomatic tonight. I think that I will write a review on the last two books that I have read, yeah! On to the SHOW!

Richard Wright-Black Boy. Oh boy, if ever there is a misnamed tome floating around, this would be the damn one. Dick should have called this book "My Road to Becoming the Biggest Asshole Ever in the History of the Earth and Why I Love, Love, Love Communism!"

Also, I searched every single site on the Internet (there are seventeen as far as you know) for a good image of the actual cover of the book that I read, THAT would show the congruence of these two book reviews, but, alas, there was none worth posting on the entire damn interwebs that fulfilled the high standards of this blog.

Anyhoo, HERE is the Wikipedia page for Dick. It seems that Dick was born in G-d's country, right here in damn Mississippi, which ties this book to today's other one as well. A native of little Roxie, MS, Dick was born into a share-cropper home and grew up po'. And he wrote about it in this damn book. Damn, Dick, you want me to go get your shawl and purse outta the damn truck? What a whining little cry-baby, this guy is. Ooooooo, Dick, you gonna get in trouble for being Black! Well, just kiss my ass from now on! (Get it, gnut?)

This story was obviously written by someone that had absolutely no damn education or common sense at all, but still managed to think that he was better than everyone else. No, he really had no education and the Communists thought that he was an intellectual and kept on his case about it. That gives you another reason to hate Communists because they are so stupid as to think that Richard Wright was an intellectual. The funny thing is that every single reference that he makes to Communism proves that he was a fool. He makes the statement on numerous occasions throughout the course of this mind-numbing drivel that he knows that Communism is the surefire bet on the governmental type lottery. And he was still pushing that agenda when he died in Europe in 1960, even after every single human in the world knew that it was an utter failure. What a dumbass!

So, he bitches and moans throughout the whole book about how bad it was growing up a poor, Black sharecropper's son and then moves to Chicago and joins the dumbest movement ever. Damn, this book is a treatise on how to completely fail at life and become a drain on society in general. And oddly enough, he bitches about the treatment of the Black man by the White man and then goes off and marries a White woman. Hinky, but she WAS an avowed Communist, and this proves that the references to his being Black are secondary to being Communist.

The thing that keeps tripping me out is that "Mississippi Believe It!" still puts him on the state posters for "great" writers, when he hated everything about our great state and everything about our great country. Dick, you suck and I hope that Communists don't even go to Hell for their crimes, I hope there is no afterlife for y'all. Okay, that was harsh.

Opinion: Read this damn book, so you never have to have a conversation with someone that thinks that Richard Wright is a great American and Mississippi writer. He denounced his country and his state. He was French.

Anne Moody-Coming of Age in Mississippi. Damn, I wish that y'all could see the cover of the Dick-Book I read, it is almost exactly like this one. But, that is where the similarities end, well not really. Here is yet another book, by yet another Black writer, that attempts to lump every Black person together and assumes that their experiences are the same because of the color of their skin. Damn, I hate that, but I did like this book. Let me tell you why.

This book starts out with another poor Black person growing up in rural Mississippi and the memories of the era are familiar to me. The experiences that Essie Mae Moody (her real name) had were some of the same that I had growing up as a "white" Catholic in rural Mississippi. Yeah, there was damn bigotry, but it made me better, not worse. These experiences filled the voids in my life, they did not exacerbate them. Remember, I am not now, nor have I ever been, Black. I do not know what that is like, but I do know that as the human race, we pretty much get the same things from the same situations. We can't turn away from the train wrecks, but still we can't stand them either.

For the sake of brevity, I shall refer to Ms. Moody as "EM", that's Essie Mae in case you fell asleep during the last paragraph. HERE's her Wikipedia page. Remember, wiki is bad about information gathering. Her parents were Diddly and Toosweet Moody, not Fred and Elmira. Those are probably just nicknames, but EM's book never refers to them as Fred and Elmira, ever.

Just like Dick, EM had issues as a child. She rarely got along with anyone. My thoughts are that she was searching for a way from the po' side of the tracks and got pissed at everyone that couldn't help her. Instead of using her anger to lift herself up from her bootstraps, she used that anger to lash out at everyone around her. She was a spoiled brat even though she didn't have a pot to piss in. And she hated whitey. That was what was odd to me. When she didn't have anything, she worked as domestic help for WHITE folks that really couldn't afford to pay her and STILL she was bitter, same as Dick. Well, enough about being poor in Mississippi except for this; it really didn't have anything to do with race. It had to do with economics, in my opinion. I really was never hungry, but still I understand, being the offspring of a single mother that rarely got financial help from a very wealthy ex-husband.

My interest lies with her road to a career. She graduated from Tougaloo College, a hotbed of socialism and subversive stuff going on back in the Sixties. Tougaloo is still a hotbed for socialism and subversive activity, but so is every other private college in the Nation. She did however participate in the Woolworths sit-in in Jackson and got her ass kicked. I respect that a whole damn bunch. She did something instead of just whining like the Dickster.

After college, she continued to be an activist and went to work for CORE in Canton, Mississippi during the most volatile times in our state's history. Death threats were not uncommon and she lived in complete fear most of the time, but she was standing up for the right things. Granted, she hated white people, too, but she still moved forward. Oh well, you can't have everything, where the Hell would you put it? Oh, CORE is the Congress for Racial Equality, in case you are white and didn't know that.

After writing all this inflammatory stuff for four hundred twenty pages, she wraps the book up with six pages of nothing but crap. It's more of that touchy-feely stuff that all of the far, far, far leftwing folks spew out. "Let's hop in the Rambler and move to Eutopia" type garbage.

Opinion: Good damn book. Held my interest for the entire read. Read it and know what it is like to date an angry, Black woman. Well, I think that she is actually a lesbian, so you couldn't date her, but that doesn't matter 'cause the lesbians are mad all the time too. Damn mad lesbians.

Final parting thoughts: Why is it when someone grows up poor, and in these cases, Black, do they always look to organizations or government to solve their problems? Why can those same people not turn to the tenets that successful people have turned? You know, when I think about something that I want to accomplish, I look to people that have accomplished that exact same thing in their own lives, I certainly don't turn to people that cannot work for anyone other than some non-profit or even worse, the government. And further and worser, countries that are poor and oppressed ALWAYS try to turn to some type of dictatorial government that has proven to further the same things that caused revolution in the first place.

A wise man once said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Yeah, George Santayana was talking about Liberals and Radicals, namely Getrude Stein, who oddly enough was friends with Dick and was also an angry lesbian. Full circle, dude.