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Summary: How Racism Affects Black Psyche
Review: This book is one of the best books I've ever read. It tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a poor black living on the South Side of Chicago. This book has so many themes contained within it. While reading this book one begins to understand the horrible living conditions for blacks during the mid-part of 20th century. One can also see how Bigger's mind has been shaped by the ones who are around him. Bigger ends up getting into a lot of trouble and with his back against the wall is forced to fight for his own survival. Everyone should read this book because it shows how one's environment can affect the way one thinks and views themselves. Richard Wright sums up this thought in his quote "If Edgar Allen Poe were alive he would not have to invent horror, horror would invent him."
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Summary: Amazing book unlike the movie
Review: When I saw the movie for Native Son I was unsatisfied and wanted so bad to read the book. Well the book is hell of amazing and I got to read Bigger's mind, plus I notice Richard Wright's originality for the first time. The story felt so real that I hardly though of it as fiction and even I don't like politics, Richard's political thoughts were well written and convincing. He had a point. So to everyone that saw the movie, please read the book. It is much better than any movie can beat.
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Summary: beautiful
Review: Wright's language and his ability to see into his character's heart-while showing us why Bigger Thomas does what he does-makes this novel classic, and one of my favorites.
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Summary: Well writen, did not like the subject amterial
Review: Throughout school I have read books such as this which means by page 30 I can predict the entire story. However, it was very well done expecially at the end.
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Summary: How Little Has Changed!
Review: Native Son is without doubt modern day literature. Wright's character development is exquisite. His plot is shockingly salient. And his writing style and sentence structure is nothing less than superb. In one of the most introspective novels of the modern day, Wright describes the plight of impoverished African Americans in Chicago in 1940. With a plot that is riveting, Wright discloses to the reader a side of society that many people never have the opportunity to witness or directly observe.With delicacy and aplomb, Wright illustrates how people with no hope of success in life can be brought to violent action not by design, but by impulse provided because of the deprivation that is imposed upon them by societal indiscretion. The pervasive prejudice that was endemic in that period is graphically articulated by Wright's well chosen words. What is most disturbing though, is how little society has changed in over 60 years. While today, there are laws that protect minorities there still exists a plethora of prejudice against those who are not White Anglo Saxon Americans. This anomaly is fueled by an unusual American xenophobia that still captures the minds of the unenlightened to a great degree. While segregation is no longer a legal practice, it still seems to be the ever present and overarching character of all too many Americans. It gives the reader pause to consider how many years must go by, before American society becomes racially neutral. Even today, only the smallest percentage of African Americans succeed in achieving the quintessential "American Dream." To most, this opportunity is just not available. Any reader who doubts that high level classic fiction can be created by modern authors will be swayed significantly by "Native Son." The book is recommended to every single American reader. It is an experience that will not be soon forgotten.
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Summary: A Classic, no doubt about it!
Review: As Bigger Thomas was riding the daughter of his boss home, she told him to come into her room (she was drunk). While Bigger Thomas was in her room, her mother walked in, Bigger Thomas didn't want the mother to know that he was there, so he put a pillow over the girl's head (the mother was blind). By the time the mother decided to leave the room the girl was smothered to dead. He didn't know what to do, so he did what came to mind first. He cut the girl's head off, and threw her body into the fireplace to be burned.
The story continues to show how Thomas attempts to get away with the crime.
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Summary: How "Bigger Thomas" lives on.
Review: This novel displays great sensitivity. The sensitivity to the rhythms and tones of language, to patterns in the colors and shapes of settings, to the way people speak and the way they act and think-- especially to the psychological motives behind those thoughts, words and actions-- is beyond praise. So, sociopolitical concerns aside, this is a bleak view of the world told in a most sensitive manner. Wright could have started _Native Son_ with the words "the alarm went off in the dark." Instead he literally makes it "brriiiiinng" out loud. And instantly we are there, in a Chicago that is black and white (again, literally), with Whites and Blacks, the white snow and black skies, the white walls and hard straight streets. This is no Romanticized view of life. Bigger Thomas is drawn in stark realistic lines, and the story moves forward like a black-and-white movie from the 1930s. Details overwhelm, but the plot flashes by. Motives are explored with precision but the prose remains clear. We are constantly aware, as if present, of a black and white nightmarish world. And dabbed on the black and white is the occasional red-- of blood, of fire (of the "Reds" themselves). Politically, some may find this novel difficult to accept, particularly in the post-O.J. era. I found it utterly convincing. "But we ought to take responsibility for our own actions," some may argue, and I agree, even though that does not sum up Bigger's situation. He knows he's guilty. But Bigger is the creation of a greedy, segregated country, and with supreme artistic sensitivity, Richard Wright simply tells it like it is. I love the message of this book, and though the violence of Bigger almost made me feel as if I was doing what he did and also living out his nightmare, above all I love the language of this novel and recommend that you read it mainly for that. I believe-- if there is one-- _Native Son_ is the great American novel.
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Summary: A Brutal Subject on the edge of a new era
Review: Richard Wright knew a bit about discomfort, and how it could generate a new sensibility. Bigger Thomas is the character who stepped into that role and the otherwise uninformed and dispassionate American psyche. He is a purebred American tragic character, our urban and racial legacy, violent and disturbing. To understand the divide between the American races, compare Tom Sawyer to Wright's Bigger. Compare even Grapes of Wrath, or any Steinbeck, to Wright's contemporary characters.
This is a brutal tale with social as well as literary scores and misses, but it is also a revolutionary event in those very same areas. In terms of a masterpiece, it falls far short, but as a novel to be read through the eyes of every American generation of adolescents, it works, and meets the educational expectations of our society at a precise developmental arc that keeps it reprinted long after perhaps worthier books fall into obscurity. Kids love this book on the whole, and can relate to the vivid imagery and injustice, similar to what is swelling in their own hearts. It's a sublime momment when self preoccupation is funneled for the first time into social activism.
Some art does have a social agenda over beauty, this is, I would dare, an instance of that otherwise shallow offering.
Rating:
Summary: A Brutal Subject on the edge of a new era
Review: Richard Wright knew a bit about discomfort, and how it could generate a new sensibility. Bigger Thomas is the character who stepped into that role and the otherwise uninformed American psyche. He is a purebred American tragic character, our urban and racial legacy, violent and disturbing. To understand the divide between the American races, compare Tom Sawyer to Wright's Bigger.
This is a brutal tale with social as well as literary scores and misses, but it is also a revolutionary event in those very same areas. In terms of a masterpiece, it falls far short, but as a novel to be read through the eyes of every American generation of adolescents, it works, and meets the educational expectations of our society at a precise developmental arc that keeps it reprinted long after perhaps worthier books fall into obscurity.
Some art does have a social agenda over beauty, this is, I would dare, an instance of that otherwise shallow offering.
Rating:
Summary: Great! , I loved it...
Review: I was introduced to Richard Wright in High School, in fact I read this book my Senior year in high school. It was really one of only a handful of books I read all the way through. I love the writing style of Wright, as well as the polital daringness of it. Anyone that would disagree may be more up for something like the Hopeless Romtatism of The Great Gasbey which I found rather dry and blan, but to each their own, personally I love his books and have read quite a handful of them. I highly recomemend it.
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