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4.36 AVERAGE
4.36 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
Kiese Laymon does it again. This book of essays is so raw and honest, written with love to Black people, especially to Black men. It's a book that I want my sons to read, the kind of book any Black mother/sister/grandmother/auntie would want the men in their lives to read. Laymon pours out his heart and soul as only he can. He writes about the Black male experience with such brutal honestly, I could only listen and shake my head (in the affirmative). His critiques are funny and heartbreaking, all at the same time. A rare 5 stars...
I really enjoyed how Laymon is unafraid to show the raw, hurting, struggling, messiness of what it means to be human. I’m interested in reading his narratives or hopefully one day listening to him speak. His confessional style is poignant, and his diction is genuine, demonstrating his intellect and character. Cool read, Bro. Brandon was a fool.
There were parts of this book that felt like they were for me, and resonated; parts that weren’t for me but that were moving and necessary; and parts where I was acutely aware that it was written by someone who has had a different set of experiences than mine. Pride and reckoning with blackness intersect with the process of a black man working out his relationship to patriarchy. The writing and the insights were both very much worthwhile, even/especially for a reader who doesn’t feel like the target audience. As Laymon says, “one of the responsibilities of American writers is to broaden the confines, sensibilities, and generative capacity of American literature by broadening the audience to whom we write, and hoping that broadened audience writes back with brutal imagination, magic, and brilliance.”
Quick read. I struggled in the middle a bit, but the last chapter hit me with a lot of emotions. I’m lucky enough to be in a book club that is going to have a Zoom meeting with Kiese Laymon, and I cant wait to chat with him about this book and his memoir: Heavy.
So this book was good! A really insightful and powerful collection of essays. The author definitely knows how to write lyrically without sounding pretentious. I think I wanna read more by Kiese Laymon to see how I really feel about him because this collection of essays was so short. But overall I learned a lot about the Black, southern experience.
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
