Description: Brilliantly portrayed by a novelist with "a talent for hyperbole and downright yarning unequaled since Mark Twin", (SATURDAY REVIEW), this slave's-eye view of the Civil War exposes America's racial foibles of the past and present with uninhibited humor and panache. "A book that reinvents the particulars of slavery in America with comic rage".--THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW.
Brief description: Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books and plays, including Mumbo Jumbo, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Flight to Canada, Conjugating Hindi, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico, Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the Audible originals Malcolm and Me and The Fool Who Thought Too Much. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism. A regular contributor to CounterPunch and founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, Reed taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for over thirty years. He has received the MacArthur Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award. Reed has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and is the only person to be nominated for the National Book Award in two categories in the same year.
Review Quotes: "A great writer."--James Baldwin