Rating: 
Summary: depressing
Review: Randall Robinson has left the building. Okay, he's left the country but not for long. If he needs medical care or decides to promote his book look for him to be right back in the States. This is a pretty sad book. It's well written --the sentences are gramatical and he states his case eloquently---but it's the most depressing thing I've read all year. Mr. Robinson may not hate white people but he sure writes like he does. He's so fed up with America that he has taken himself and his family and ran away to a small formerly English colony island, St. Kitts. Instead of staying and fighting for what he beleives in, he's chosen to cut and run. Sad.
Rating: 
Summary: Robinson Goes Home
Review: Randall Robinson has put his detractors in a curious position: they have told him all his life that if America is such a bad place, why not just leave? Well, now he has. Quitting America soberly sheds light on the fact that many of us have grown increasingly aware of, that this country is without hope. The powers are too deeply entrenched, minds obsessed with too many glittering distractions and rhyming falsehoods, skulls and skins too thick to think or care anymore, a wasted horde of human beings compelled to the end to taking and taking and taking for the sake of a progress whose true face lay ugly and deep within the unconscious racial and class prejudices of western man. The logical consequence of European culture. Most Americans will live and die in America in quiet desperation, but it is to Robinson's great credit that he shows that there are warm shores to swim to for those who still have the spirit to leap overboard and flee the sinking ship. There is still hope for humanity, not because of America, but rather without America.
Rating:
Summary: On Target but Depressing
Review: Randall Robinson is a distinguished author, realist and American. He is also visibly of African descent, and that part of his heritage informs his thinking, acting, and existance as an American. Robinson sums up his discontents with American society well, although he sometimes wanders along when he could be sprinting. He points out clearly the attractions of a society which functions more like the society he wants in America but cannot find.
Robinson's book is another testament to the negative effects of racism in our culture, and to the deep roots of race-based slavery in the black American psyche. He tells it like he sees it, and he sees more clearly than most. At the same time, he provides few workable solutions and little hope for those of us who remain here battling with the oppressive atmosphere and devastating results of institutionalized racism. Robinson's portrait of St. Kitts is a siren song which many hear but most of us are tied to the mast, unable to loosen our bonds. And that may not be a bad thing for America, although it may remain a hazard for us personally.
Rating: 
Summary: Quitting America
Review: Randall Robinson's Quitting America is a treatise on racism--black racism. Rather than pointing the finger at white Americans for things their ancestors have done, perhaps he should point the finger back at himself and other black Americans who choose to play victim and who ignore the fact that it was white Americans who fought and died for the freedom of slaves, and who have worked tirelessly to help black people move out of their oppressed state. Instead of focusing on the negative aspects of the past, Robinson should help the black community focus on the positive of the present and future. This identification of black Americans as victims serves only to widen the racial divide--not mend it. As white Americans try to move forward to a racially equal and peaceful America, Robinson's work is to pull black Americans back into the racist past. It would do Robinson well to try to raise up the black community by encouraging integration, rather than preaching aparteid and trashing America, when America has given him so much. If you want to fuel your racism, this is the book for you. Read on, hate, and remain unenlightened.
Rating:
Summary: Consider its realities and demand change from leaders
Review: Readers of Mr. Robinson's latest work will inevitably fall into one of two camps: one that harbors the collective consciousness of those who embrace his message for America to change its ill-fated domestic and foreign policies for the world's betterment or the other that dismisses his message as being nothing more than racism towards white Americans and Europeans. The latter, when examined from the broad historical contexts which Mr. Robinson delves, could not be farther from the truth. As the old idiom goes, "the proof is in the pudding." White Americans and Europeans alike have much to apologize for on the current state of world affairs--namely, perpetuating past and contemporary slavery, South African apartheid, supporting debilitating, inhumane effects of economic sanctions imposed on needy countries, the unaccounted killings of innocent Iraqis, and much, much more. These vile actions undertaken by many of our most established industrialized countries today date as far back as Christopher Columbus' discovery of the New World. Of all countries, however, as Mr. Robinson reckons, boastful America, the embodiment of democracy, is the greatest antagonist of its very own political ideals. It is time for the entire world's people-white, black, brown, red, and yellow-to wake up and take action before it's too late, as Mr. Robinson suggests. We are living in a world where America, for the most part, relishes its hegemony over nearly everything that happens on the world's platform. The danger in this, as Mr. Robinson brilliantly exposes, is that white Americans and Europeans, having contemptuously established unimaginable amounts of economic and political superiority by enslaving and alienating its past and contemporary victims, simply cannot or refuses to see what is happening right before their very eyes: that their hedonistic and narcissistic indulgences throughout history has injected a cancerous moral decay upon unsuspecting societies all over the world, which, in sum, has dauntingly assured the world's eventual apocalyptic demise. And it is for these reasons, in short, that Mr. Robinson deserted the land which he now characterizes as alien and devoid of hope: America.
Rating: 
Summary: Good riddance
Review: Robinson has labeled Quitting America a "testament of leave-taking, a single angry wind guttering in an angry wind of national hysteria." He is right that this an angry book full of sound and fury. For black Americans if offers enslaving victimization; for whites, it offers bald hatred. In singing the song of racist persecution, Robinson demeans the sacrifices and successes of so many great black men and women from the past and present - rebels, intellectuals, activists, judges, and public officials, people like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Clarence Thomas, and yes, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. Robinson inexcusably denies the simple, obvious truth that black Americans (Robinson included) have benefited from a racial revolution that has profoundly transformed American society. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the growth of the black middle class and the presence of blacks in positions of political, legal and intellectual power are all testaments to these remarkable changes. For Robinson, these changes have never occurred, and America is a bastion of closet Klansmen and lynching parties.
Rating:
Summary: good riddance!!!
Review: see ya, racist! too bad you've always been a divider, not a healer. i guess the fact that your crummy propaganda books get published at all is really a testament to how wonderful america is.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant -
Review: There are those idiots who will criticise R.R's book.
There are those who will dream up imaginary sacrifices that an Imperialist establishment has made for its victims.
There are those who choose to blame the victims instead.
But there are also the open eyed, open minded and wise readers who see RR's words and recognise them for what they are - he describes a boorish, illmannered, self obsessed nation - dangerous in every way.
Good jobRR.
Rating:
Summary: Not impressed
Review: This book follows the emigration of an American to a small carribean Island. According to this book America was just to hard on this person. Although the main character had gained vast sums of wealth due to a previous book he had sold America hadn't given him enough. Although he had benefited from affirmative action and other quota systems it wasn't enough, in the end this book is about failure and whining. This book is about someone who wanted everything for free and wanted everything on a silver platter and when it didn't arrive they cried 'racism' and abandoned their country because supposedly some little carribean hideway was blind to racial aspects. Of course the little carribean hamlet is only 'blind' because no diversity exists on it and there are few other people living on the island the main character moves too. A very disappointing book about someone who is just a quitter, although he claims to be disillusioned and let down and suppressed, maybe he should go to former soviet Russia and see real suppression then he might not take America for granted. A very depressing story, whose totality is basically told by the title.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best writers in American History
Review: This book is arguably Robinson's best work. He has the eloquence/anger that is reminiscent of Du Bois in The Soul of Black Folks and David Walker in Appeal with a dash of James Baldwin's non-fictional work (e.g. The fire next time) He speaks with honestly and seems to follow a higher sense of being. For example, the story that he tells in the book about not accepting the honorary degree from Georgetown University reveals that he has a lot of strength and honor without appearing preachy or self-righteous. He taught me lesions about Simon Bolivar's relationship with Haiti that I didn't know and I have a degree in history.
Lastly, the above review states that the situation in Rwanda shows that Africans can be as brutal as Americans. But, the question has to be asked, who laid the foundation that eventually led to the hatred that the Hutu had for the Tutsi? It was the Belgians that all but ignored the aforementioned Hutu and gave the Tutsi's the few positions of power within the country. This example once again shows the inherit evil intent of some European powers. One would be wise to learn from the "two-cradle theory" of Dr. Cheik Anta Diop, that states that the majority of Euro centric societies have proven themselves to be: paternalistic, war like, and private in land ownership. While the ancient societies of native America, Africa, and Asia had proven to be the exact opposite.
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