The Portable Promised Land: Stories

Rating:
Summary: I think the sequel will be better...
Review: Now I'm not really a fan of magic realism. In fact, every other book I've tried to read in the genre I've never finished. This collection was actually not so bad. The stories take place in Soul City, a urban black utopia of sorts. Some of the stories left me a bit bored, but others were good. I got the chance to meet Toure and he read some of the stories that will be in his next book which centers around more residents of Soul City. I'll be sure to pick it up because it seems like he is only maturing as a writer.

Rating:
Summary: A Portable Pleasure
Review: The Portable Promised Land is portable laughter, portable epiphany, and a portable good time. I brought it up to my roof and read some of it aloud to my roomate. I read one story to my boyfriend. This book wanted, begged even, to be shared aloud. I laughed at Toure's caricatures of black urban life (the redundancy of fast food fried chicken chains in Brooklyn), at his crazy imagination (an enormous preacher jumps into the air and hovers fifty feet above his congregation) and at the strokes of linguistic genius that elevate a story from the merely entertaining to a seriously sweet read. I also like that his "Afrolexicology" list includes "Vodou" - spelled according to proper Haitian Creole.

Rating:
Summary: Black to the Future
Review: This book is a tasty honey pot for your imagination.
The author is dealing with a genre that, in my opinion, has been drastically in need of a spark plug change. And this book does just that. The Portable Promised Land is a magic-fantastical tour of the Hip-Hop Experience, the Black Experience, and most importantly, the intelligent American Experience.
The book begins with resources usually covered ad nausea by "hip-hop" books: the slang, the icons of Black history and pop culture, the fashion, the Djs, the dystopia, Etc. etc. But Portable Promised Land wins because it proceeds to grind these icons through the mill of examination, through a comic and tragic surreal trip that places its mini Black Epics (Brooklyn Renaissances?) into contexts that beat alive in your heart through their familiarity.
This is no cool-prose-in-a-Last-Poets-cadence. This book is Gabriel Garcia Marquez telling you stories about why Tupac Shakur could set a dry barn on his fire with his soul. It's a smart book that doesn't insult your intelligent, or your integrity, but being "just" about Hip-Hop. It's really just a great and varied collection of impossible tales.
Highly recommended.