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Overview
Walking on Wateris a profoundly moving and provocative account--both timely and enduring--of the thoughts, the feelings, the lives, of African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era of the nineties, by the highly praised author ofLet the Dead Bury Their DeadandA Visitation of Spirits. Traversing the country over a period of six years, Randall Kenan talked to nearly two hundred African Americans, whose individual stories he has shaped into a continent-sized tapestry of black American life today. He starts his journey in the famous, long-standing black resort community on Martha's Vineyard, travels up through New England, and heads west, visiting Chicago, Minneapolis (home of the singer Prince and of the Pilgrim Baptist Church, with its seven choirs and vast outreach), Coeur d'Alene (skinhead capital of the world), Seattle, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. He moves on to the South, to Louisiana and St. Simons Island, where so many slave ships landed, and ends up at home in North Carolina, telling his own family's story. Kenan talks to a wide variety of people: to the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West; to the Republican congressman from Alaska, Walter Furnace; to a rising young air force major whose father was lynched in Alabama when the major was a child; to a vocal welfare mom. He interviews a retired railroad conductor, an energetic "child of the dream" majoring in public relations at the University of North Dakota, Atlanta's new Panther-style militants, a bisexual AIDS activist, a twelve-year-old girl who fought the racism at her elementary school with a stunning essay, a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah. He speaks to teachers, retired maids, filmmakers, dancers, entrepreneurs, cyberspace whizzes, lawyers, farmers, painters, and many, many more. The people we meet--each with his or her own unique slant on black life--are fascinating. And as we listen to them, a multifaceted portrait of the black community at the end of the century emerges, with its diverse and little-known local cultures, its widely varying accommodations to integration, its desire to keep the soul-satisfying elements of black life intact while integrating with the larger society, its many ways of coping with the discrimination that remains: its triumphs, its problems, its optimism in spite of all the odds. Walking on Wateris a richer, sharper, fuller picture than we have yet had of the astonishing experience of being black in America.
| ISBN-13 | 9780679408277 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0679408274 |
| Weight | 2.40 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 7.00 x 1.75 x 9.50 In |
| List Price | $30.00 |
| Format | Hardcover |
|---|---|
| Pages | xii, 668 pages |
| Publisher | Knopf |
| Published On | 1999-02-02 |
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Half Price Books Inc
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Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and ...
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It's a preowned item in good condition and includes all the pages. It may have some general signs ...
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Nelson & Nelson, Booksellers
Trenton, SC, USA
0679408274. Hardcover 2nd printing with scant shelfwear. DJ crisp, clean, with minimal wear (no tea...
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Priceless Books
Urbana, IL, USA
668pp. Index. Light wear.
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Southampton Sag Harbor Books
Southampton, NY, USA
First Edition, First Printing. Not price-clipped. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Octavo. Hard...
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