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A review by tessyohnka
Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
At the outset, I had such reservations about reading a book with an inside take on the Senator/candidate for president's campaign. With the political climate we are mired in now, I didn't want anyone spoiling my appreciation of Obama. As luck would have it, there were no new revelations aside from complaints that must be inevitable in a long and rigorous campaign. So the book was really more about episodes in the narrator's/author's? journey which didn't consistently capture my interest and occasionally felt like filler.
The Pentecostal stories were charming and I particularly enjoyed this admission:
"Let's face it in all its strangeness: I was raised in an atmosphere of magic, christened into unrealism, made to feel most at home amid excruciating cognitive dissonance, the kind that never resolved. I believed and didn't believe and felt the strain."
Another favorite moment was the comparison of his childhood introduction to DuSable to the candidate:
"On elementary school quizzes in history I'd had to identify him as the founder of Chicago. Whatever your circumstances, our teachers had said, you could be proud of a black man like this, from whose foreign hands your whole world, the whole heaving city around your, flowed.I imagined du Sable now as a twin of the candidate: come from parts unknown to the Midwest. mimicking then mastering the rhythms of its deeper currents, making his name, staking out ground. The campaign was like a fur he'd won in a trade."
I wouldn't think this is a particularly strong contender in the Tournament of Books.
The Pentecostal stories were charming and I particularly enjoyed this admission:
"Let's face it in all its strangeness: I was raised in an atmosphere of magic, christened into unrealism, made to feel most at home amid excruciating cognitive dissonance, the kind that never resolved. I believed and didn't believe and felt the strain."
Another favorite moment was the comparison of his childhood introduction to DuSable to the candidate:
"On elementary school quizzes in history I'd had to identify him as the founder of Chicago. Whatever your circumstances, our teachers had said, you could be proud of a black man like this, from whose foreign hands your whole world, the whole heaving city around your, flowed.I imagined du Sable now as a twin of the candidate: come from parts unknown to the Midwest. mimicking then mastering the rhythms of its deeper currents, making his name, staking out ground. The campaign was like a fur he'd won in a trade."
I wouldn't think this is a particularly strong contender in the Tournament of Books.