Rating: 
Summary: I don't understand the detractors
Review: Charles Johnson's The Middle Passage is a brilliant book. Period. On the surface it is an oceanic adventure story in the high tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson and Herman Melville and it certainly lives up to those illustrious forbearers. But there is so much more than that involved.The book is also a rumination on race and the black experience, and an examination of what it means to be an African American in the modern age. Johnson accomplishes this in a work of historical fiction so artfully though that it never falls into the trap of heavy moralization that such themes are prone to. But even beyond that are the intertwined threads of Hegelian philosophy, Phenomenology, Buddhist epistemology, and manages to make a coherent philosophical argument without ever dealing overtly with the problems of philosophy. And then there are the Allmuseri. Johnson's fictional African Tribe is wondrous and a sign of a superlative imagination that stripped of the trappings of postmodern literature would be a joy in and of itself. I'm currently in the process of forcing all of my friends to read this book, and it has quickly become one of my favorites. I really don't see how anyone who truly enjoys great literature could fail to fall in love with this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Holy baloney, people!
Review: I found this book really intersting, i had to read it for a book report and my teacher happens to know charles johnson. I think that this book is well written, you can really get a feel for what Rutherford is going through, i mean, if that was my only chance and i were him, i would take it in half a heart beat. If you only pay attention to what the events are, and how accurate the dates are, then you miss the whole plot and the beautiful writing that Charles uses. I can understand using and shifting actual events slightly to fit the story, to make it better, as he did. Who cares if Charles Darwin hadn't thought up the 'missing link' yet? or if a slave has been educated? By a minister who feels guilty about owing slaves? or if dime novels hadn't been invented yet? or the hegelian theory or philosify or what not wasn't well known in the 1830s? that shouldn't stop you from enjoying a good book! i would definatly recomend this book, the parallels between this man's life and Odicious (Spelling?) from Homer's Odyssey. It made a surpising but excellent ending. now, i will stop raving to let you read this book!
Rating: 
Summary: THIS won the National Book Award?
Review: I read this book in a class, and although the teacher who assigned it usually has good judgement, he made a serious mistake in this case. This book is lacking in just about every respect. Except for the protagonist, the characters are mostly boring and one-sided. The plot is contrived in the extreme and relies far too much on improbable coincidences. It is also much too predictable, with an overly pat ending which wrecked any suspension of disbelief I might have retained. Some of the events just don't make sense; for example, the protagonist opens a ship's log at one point and within a short time knows the entire life story of the captain in a high degree of detail. The only really interesting plot element is abandoned without any kind of resolution. There are also numerous errors in this book. It is laden with glaring anachronisms (which may be intentional, but serve no useful literary purpose) and factual contradictions, and the author is apparently ignorant of the definitions of words like "octave" (a unit of pitch, not volume!) and "iamb" (a type of metrical foot of which "Falcon" is definitely not an example). The way the story is told makes little sense. At first, I thought it was a journal, but realized that it referred to future entries. Eventually it came out that the narrator was retroactively completing a ship's log, but things still don't make sense--even if someone doing that used date-based entries, he would not split one conversation between two entries that were three days apart solely for dramatic effect. I'll give credit where credit is due--the writing style was sometimes entertaining and the descriptions of the god were interesting. Aside from that, this book is a waste of your time and money. I have no idea why the National Book Foundation would give it any particular notice. As a side note, the aforementioned English teacher (who will not, I think, be assigning this book again--I am not alone in my opinion) believes that this book is a parody. If it had been presented as one, I might evaluate it differently, but the cover, the blurb, and even the editorial quotes, as well as some of the more serious themes, all indicate that it is intended as a serious work, and I think we should evaluate it that way,
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining, but kinda silly
Review: I selected this book partly because it's advertised as being very historically accurate. Sadly, it doesn't seem the case. In fact, it's so inaccurate as far as the thoughts, values and progression of events, that the only explanation I can come up with is that it's an attempt at "magic realism."
The story takes place in 1830, where a young black man, Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave turned petty thief, ends up hopping a ship in New Orleans and discovers he's on a slave ship. The whole story is told by this emancipated slave, written into the ship's log by him.
Rutherford is, of course, taught at home by his master before he's freed. But would even a well-taught rural boy think in terms of Kant and Hegel, neoplatonists and the Pseudodionysis? A modern graduate student, perhaps, might people his thoughts like this, but not an 1830's farmboy-turned-thief. A phrase like "post-Christian moonscape" (describing the Captain's cabin after it's been ransacked) sounds perfectly at home in a late-twentieth century fiction, but completely out of place here. He knows all about evolution, before Darwin published, and the "missing link" which is an idea that developed about a century later.
Towards the end of the book, he's out of sorts partly, he thinks, because he's passed through so many time zones. Time zones, however, didn't exist then, they were invented by the American railroads well after the Civil War. And even aside from that, would you notice the changing of time zones in a trip that takes months to cross the Atlantic ocean?
Rutherford is, of course, black. But his brother, also black, has freckles. And, after several months at sea, our hero has somehow grown a beard of old testament length.
The biggest problem, though, is a terribly anachronistic point of view regarding slavery. Rutherford is horrified by the idea of slavery, and the worst part of it all is that one of the powerful black men of New Orleans, is actually smuggling slaves. A black man would own another black man as a slave? Beyond inconceivable! Except, of course, that it happened regularly in the American south, and, in fact, black slaveowners were not known to be particularly gentle. The slaves were fed into the slave trade back in Africa by other blacks, who had no compunction about enslaving fellow Africans. In fact, the leader of the Africans in the Amistad (the real ship, not the Spielberg fantasy) eventually returned to Africa and became a well-to-do slave trader. To a modern eye, of course, the idea of a black man participating in slavery seems nightmarish, but in 1830 America, it was just the way things were.
Of course, the explanation on the back of the book is that he's gone mad, and perhaps all this bizarre inaccuracy and anachronism is an expression of that. Which, I suppose, is a convenient device, but not a very convincing one.
Oddly enough, all these anachronistic thoughts and values are expressed in what sounds, at least to me, fairly well-done period prose.
All that said, the story is fast moving, and entertaining, if you pass through the boilerplate philosophizing. It'd make a good HBO movie, I suppose. If you want a good historical novel, read "Cold Mountain" or anything by Margurite Yourcenaur. If you want magic realism, read Vargos Llosa or García Marquez. Reading some of the other reviews, I see a suggestion that the whole book was a parody. While I don't think that's accurate, it does make some sense.
Rating:
Summary: Much Better than I expected
Review: It goes without saying that slavery and the kidnapping of millions of people from Africa was an unmitigated tragedy. A crime against humanity with few parallels in the long and sordid history of the human race, it would seem commonsensical that only an ignoramus or violent racist could write a work about the slave trade that could be called a comedy. Where Charles Johnson is concerned, common sense needs to cast aside. In his short novel Johnson is able to shows full horror of the slave trade in such a fashion that the reader can not make light of it for even a moment-the novel is partially about a slave rebellion and its consequences-but the cast of principals are so utterly strange, their behavior and dialogue so funny, that side splitting laughter is very often the only reasonable response.
A lecherous and vagabond ex-slave; an overly refined and educated free women of color with a proclivity collect dogs and cats missing limbs; a drunken sailor with a foul mouthed parrot who prepares food best described as stomach trouble with fat on it; a ship officer with psychopathic abilities of total recall; a buggering ship's captain whose short stature is further insulted by the fact his hideously ugly wife is in the habit of picking her nose during love making and who compensates for this by attempting to spread the manifest destiny of the United States to every corner of the globe and bragging about his cannibalism in polite company. Set on a back drop first of New Orleans and then upon a slave ship, and narrated by the indomitable Rutherford Calhoun-who has the bad fortune of running afoul of a Creole gangster and then stowing away upon a slave ship he believes to be a Mississippi riverboat-the above mentioned lecherous and vagabond ex-slave, this work ranks with the best novels that aspire towards the mantra of "The Great American Novel." This may sound hyperbolic but it is written with utter seriousness-this is truly a fine book.
To go on to further descriptions of characters or events in the novel would be to deprive the reader of the opportunity seeing the utter strangeness and fun of the novel unfold. An utterly evil thing to do.
Rating:
Summary: National Book Award?????
Review: It has taken me way too long to finish this novel and I've never been more thrilled to get to the end of a book! "Middle Passage" is the story of a wayward freed slave in 1830's New Orleans. Rutherford stows away, unknowingly, on a ship set for Africa in search of slaves and treasures. After purchasing a tribe of Africans and the God they worship, the ship sets sail for its return to America. The slaves orchestrate a mutiny and take control of the ship. The crew suffers severe injuries at the hands of the rebelling Africans. The ship suffers even worse damage from a storm. The captain kills himself, unable to face his American investors after losing control of his ship and its loot. There's much more killing, and maiming, and flesh eating, and vomiting and bleeding. Then, the weather battered ship sinks but Rutherford and the ship's cook are rescued by a passing boat. They return to New Orleans... Rutherford tells the story via journal entries. The author stays true to the language of the period, an award winning feat for the writer but dreadfully laborious and dull for this reader. This is the second novel I've read by Charles Johnson and I've concluded that this author just doesn't do it for me. I found the novel required too much effort and didn't provide nearly enough payoff. Can't recommend this one.
Rating:
Summary: Middle Passage: More Than Just Slavery
Review: Middle Passage is an exciting novel that isn't just about slavery; it is a very detailed account of the conditions aboard a slave ship of the 1830's and a look at the thoughts Rutherford, a freed black slave. It's a nice mix of serious ideas and comedy interlaced with very graphic descriptions of a mutiny attempt and the long, harsh voyage between New Orleans and Africa. If you like adventure, detail, and an interesting plot, you will probably like this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Middle Passage as literature
Review: Reading this text as a part of the African-American literary tradition rather than as an independent work may have given me a different perspective, but I found this to be an intensely felt and intricately structured look, not only at historic slave trafficking, but also at the current and more recent African-American experience. This text is not entirely historically accurate, but that appears to me to be a literary device rather than a failing on Johnson's part. And some of the things that other reviewers found objectionable have an interesting and complex history throughout the African-American literary tradition. An example of this is the inclusion of references to philosophers and classical Greek and Roman culture. Establishing credibilty as a writer, not in the way that white authors do, but in the sense of establishing that one is intelligent and even human enough to write, is something that black authors like Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and countless others went to great pains to do. Wheatley, for example, was interrogated at length by white scholars to establish that she could have authored her works and earn an authenticating letter. It is interesting to me that so many people feel that Johnson failed because he challenged some dearly held literary conventions (not rules). Since when has creative been a liability in fiction writing?
Rating:
Summary: what a travesty...
Review: Seeing some of these reviews confirms my notion about how the general public will praise crap like "The Da Vinci Code" or brain dead housewives will weep over the terrible "The Lovely Bones" or think pretentious, cliched narratives like "The Time Traveler's Wife" are worth exploring. This was the 1st CJ book I ever read, and from there I have read every one since. His best book is Oxherding Tale, but this comes in as a close second. 1st of all, I must respond to the rather biased nagative reviews claiming "how would an ex-slave speak so intellegently about Kant, etc..." well, the point here is that the "I" being used in the book isn't necessarily Rutheford at that point in time, but perhaps years later, or even after his death. "The Lovely Bones" is an awful book that attempts having a narrator who is dull as s**t speak after she is murdered. The one reviewer commenting about how certain railroads didn't exist until after the Civil War is probably the closest hint yr gonna get to show that this story is being told after his death, or much, much later. It's been a while since I read this book, but the descriptions are poetic and rich, and it's just sad how yet again the cliche is confirmed: take a great book like Middle Passage, and the reviews will be middling good. But take yr average sappy, bathetic Oprah pick, and housewives will be rolling on the floor. If you like real literature, this is for you. But if what you want is crap, then you won't get it.
Rating:
Summary: Middle Passage Falls Short of Its Destination
Review: Set in 1830, Middle Passage is the story about an educated, freed slave named Rutherford Calhoun. Wishing to escape his debts and a marriage proposal, Calhoun boards the Republic, a ship bound for Africa to illegally pick up slaves. In his capacity, Calhoun is incapable of understanding or relating to the conditions and future life that the slaves, a group of magicians from the heart of Africa, will and do endure. The phrase "middle passage" refers not only to the journey the slaves take from their homeland in the bowels of the ship to America, but also Calhoun's transformation from a self-admitted thief, lier, and womanizer to a humble, broken man, willing to accept home and family as his future. Unfortunately, the transformation, while convincing, falls short with a clumsy attempt at romance in the final chapter of the text. Clocking in at a lean two hundred pages as a combination slave narrative and sea story and the winner of the National Book Award, most of the book was enjoyable, despite extremely graphic representations of bodily illnesses and decay from the long journey, until the end. There, I was left unsatisfied and disappointed.
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