Rating: 
Summary: Great American Novel
Review: This could well be the great American Novel that was anticipated. The ideas are powerful and cross racial bounderies. Ellison is a master and re-creates moods with skill. He glorifies the commonplace.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliantly Disappointing
Review: Although Ralph Ellison's prose is masterfully, I found the body of work within Juneteenth to be disjointed and nonlinear in scope. Perhaps in someways it parallels Joyce's Ulysses, but falls woefully short of the mark.
Rating: 
Summary: a good but frustrating read
Review: As with any other unfinished work (The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Garden of Eden, etc.) it is difficult to read this without wondering what it might have been if Ellison had finished it. On the downside, there is much here that needs explanation and fleshing out. There are interesting nods in certain directions that leave the reader longing for more. And there is the inevitable feeling that a much richer story lies just beneath the surface. However, there are rich passages of prose in this book which are a welcome addition to Ellison's body of work. The concept, the plot, and the route taken to get there is full of rewards along the way. "Juneteenth" is a sketch of something that could have been truly magnificent, but is still nevertheless a fascinating look into the mind of one of America's greatest writers.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth Reading, but not Great
Review: Ellison again brings us his paradigms on race relations in America, but this time, through an editor. John F. Callahan seems to have put this together as best he could, but I don't find the organic unity which is present in Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN. JUNETEENTH seems to be quite a few stories (and wonderful stories, at that) strung together to make a novel. They are related, but not unified. The language, however, is very compelling; the surreality of it is very powerful, reminiscent of Faulkner.
Rating:
Summary: Complex, brilliant, choppy, hard to read....
Review: From over 2000 pages of manuscript, John Callahan, the literary executer of Ralph Ellison's estate has done his best to patch together what might have been Ellison's last great novel. Unfortunately while some of the prose is wild and beautiful in Ellison's way, the whole of this effort may leave the reader with a very choppy, unhinged body of work. The basis of the story is a good one, young white boy (Bliss) adopted and raised by big African American southern preacher (who is also something of a con - part and parcel), Alonzo Z. Hickman, boy becomes first a scam artist (in the guise of a movie maker) then a horribly racist US Senator (Allan Sunraider).... book begins when the then old preacher comes to Washington DC with a group of his more elderly churchgoers to visit with the Senator ('before it's too late") and is not allowed to see him. The group with the preacher are in the Senate Gallery days later when a young man near them stands up and peppers the Senator with bullets. The body of the book is a compilation of stream of consciousnesses, dialogues, monologues, conversations, and described situations during Bliss's/Sunraider's life. In Ellison style, much of the book is what is going on in the minds of the character(s) during given situations. So much is happening in this book - so much of what Ellison wanted us to understand, to draws parallels with, to see more 'racially' clearly... and I simply found it tedious to wade through. The extensive introduction written by Callahan at the beginning of the book, and the very interesting "notes" section at the end were a positive addition to helping me to more clearly 'hear' what was happening in the minds of these two men during the end of Bliss's life.
Rating: 
Summary: Unreadable
Review: Let the thirteen page Introduction be a warning to anyone who dares venture beyond. Anyone who reads more the Introduction does so at his or her own peril. The book is barely readable. It should be obvious to even a casual reader that this book was cobbled together. This book does an injustice to the name and legacy of Ralph Ellison.
Rating:
Summary: Not Finished, but Neither Is the Fight Against Racism
Review: Much of the attention surrounding this posthumously compiled and titled novel Juneteenth, has focused on it's unfinished nature. True, in many spots the prose is difficult and plot trasitions are hard to follow. However, Ellison's mastery of the language and his awareness of race relations in the US, make this novel, though unfinished, a poignant follow up to Invisible Man. Ellison, via Callhoun's splicing, delves into the possibilities for equality among races, and the hope that one day we might all, black and white, be led out of the bonds of slavery and into a glorious promised land. Unfortunately, in Ellisons rendering, that Moses is sick and dying, and desperately in need of remembering who he is and where he came from. The end of the novel, although it may be abrupt and full of more questions than answers, might actually be closer to the truth than Ellison might have hoped to achieve. It leaves us as readers to ponder who we are and what we think the outcome might be (infact the last of his notes suggests this kind of relationship of this novel to his redaers). Is racisim truly an eternal bond that we shall never be free of? As in the novel, the answer is up to you.
Rating:
Summary: To see is to be!
Review: Ralph Ellison is back on our desks. His posthumous novel, marvellously edited by John F. Callahan, is the continuation of the reality and vision of Invisible Man. It is a book on identity, the identity of the black man, beyond the long period of suffering under slavery, and then discrimination. It is a visionary book about the future rising of the black man over these circumstances and into the future. But it is also a very accurate portrait of the black man's self-inflicted alienation : I mean religion, I mean the rite of Juneteenth to celebrate the end of slavery as a myth of rebirth, in June, in continuation with ancient summer rites, and a total blending with the Christ's resurrection and the belief in a life after death. We feel in the main character, a preacher of that new era, his fear for and defensiveness toward the modern world, the cinema that he accuses of giving the viewers an illusion about reality, without seeing that what he calls the Truth, that is to say his belief in God's will could be seen as an illusion too, but also without seeing that men and women, children and adults are fascinated by new communication techniques, hence by the cinema. And we do know better than this character. Ellison shows very precisely how the black preacher is trapped in his own illusion, in his own fantasmagoric world of « true » intentions that are false because leading to an impasse. He is very critical all along of this preacher's refusing to tell the real truth to Bliss, his white adopted child that he is grooming into becoming his preaching assistant and a preacher himself, so « lying » to the child in the name of a superior Truth, God's Truth. Vanity on his side to pretend he knows God's intentions and motivations. The real truth is always best and any lie is nothing but a lie and it distorts or twists reality. But there is another dimension to that book : its lyrical and poetical approach of man, humanity, growing, human objectives, hatred and love, and it is this dimension that makes Ralph Ellison universal and able to go beyond racial and racist limitations. And this universality has to do with personality : a man cannot deny his deep nature and he has to go along his own road, but his personality will be built little by little along this road with the stones and bricks he will find there, from what he will learn from people he will meet, from the events he will have to face and be confronted to. Freedom is an individual dimension, just like truth, but freedom and truth have no meaning whatsoever if they are not shared with other people and their freedoms and truths. In other words, there is NO ONE TRUTH revealed to us by God or some kind of prophet or any other authority, be it the Senate or the Supreme Court. Truth is a construct just like freedom is a conquest. And conquering and constructing truth and freedom, one's truth and freedom, may be very frightening and disquieting, and it may also hurt many other people if one does not accept to share one's truth and one's freedom with these others. Ralph Ellison in this book reaches the acme of his vision. He leaves invisibility behind and he finds a way to see and represent the invisible. « What goes on in that darkness I create when I refuse to see ? » he writes. And that is exactly what this book is : how to explore and disspell this darkness cast on oneself and on the world by this stubborn refusal to see. And any man, each man, every man and all men are obliged, sooner or later, to open their eyes and see reality. « The light of the body is the eye ! » Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris Universities II and IX.
Rating:
Summary: If you didn't like Invisible Man...
Review: The idea of paternal reconciliation across race lines was what inspired me to choose this book for a summer read. Though the idea is one that could have been a page turner, the stream of consciousness style that is Ellison's trademark completely killed it for me. If you did not apprecitate Invisible Man, reader beware. This book was difficult for me to read as well as enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: Glimpses but Difficult
Review: This book gives you an interesting glimpse into what had the potential to be a truly masterful and brilliant novel. I'll give Callahan credit for making a valiant attempt at pulling together this great work. While there are passages that give you glimpses into what this work could have become, the whole just doesn't hold together well. It's very disjointed, as you would expect an unfinished work condensed from thousands of pages to be. At the end of it, I was glad to have read it, but I wasn't sure exactly what I had read or what had happened.The interesting thing is that the introductory notes, and the excerpt notes at the end gave me a better feel for what this work's potential was than the actual novel itself. It aspired to greatness, and that has to be admired, but missed the mark.
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