Saturday, April 2, 2011

Category: "Book Reviews"

Suskind - A Hope in the Unseen

Ron Suskind depicts persons -- as well as their personal relationships. He is one of the best writers. Having a dense style; but the more I read him, the more I get used to him, until he seems an old friend. Very few writers can do that.

I have no relationships.


R. Kennedy - Sellout

"Don't sell out" is an easy thing to say. He opens with the notion of group identity. His preface states, in the second sentence, the obvious. Blacks -- like other groups -- have a strong group identity.
And the whites, influenced by "democracy" but in reality by capitalism, pretend that the obvious has been obliterated -- not, in reality, obfuscated.

Now, of course, R. Kennedy is not going to say that. He would be at risk to piss a lot of persons off. Wouldn't he?
Kennedy is totally, 100% ruling class. He ought to write one called "How to Get Along with White People." Instead he writes book with a different kind of title: title words for his books are, for example, "Nigger" ("the strange career of a troublesome word") and "Sellout" (The Politics of Racial Betrayal").

What's the difference between Suskind and Kennedy?

Kennedy uses words to manipulate language while Suskind uses words as signs, to depict what life is really like, or, (equivalently and alternatively) to get into experience.
Kennedy's words merely refer to other words. Suskind's words refer to life. What life is is always subject to opinion and disagreement, but, there is a distinction there between two ways of writing.

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