The Women

Rating:
Summary: A Bold, Original Treasure
Review: Hilton Als discovers himself--strangely, a brilliant negress in negro-boy body--in this small but large masterpiece. Ignore the truly self-serving, hypersensitive comments of the Dodson advocate above whose comments "trash" Mr. Als. If you care about beauty, art, the psychology of negritude, the complexity of gender, honesty as it relates to revelation--then read this devastating book, which is a thrilling, one-of-a-kind experience.

Rating:
Summary: Almost as dreadful as the ghastly Dorothy Dean herself
Review: Hilton Als has a certain amount of writing ability but it obvious that he is not a person of genuine intellect (he is certainly not qualified to be a literary critic, for example) and he is definitely a person with no integrity. The fashionable and perfectly silly ideas he advances might be overlooked if he were at least capable of simple honesty. Instead he chooses to denigrate his betters while presenting his arbitrary theories. In regard to the former, he is is a sorry example of a phenomenon that only Wanda Coleman, one of the foremost contemporary African-American poets, has been honest about: the relentless presumptuousness of blacks of Caribbean background who simultaneously exploit and trash the gains and achievements of stateside black people. In this regard, he joins Harry Belafonte with his vulgar, Marxist-inspired trashing of the African-American church and Audre Lorde with her much-overrated poetry. I can only attribute this to jealousy on the part of islanders. Even though slavery was abolished earlier in the islands than in the U.S. and they enjoy a far greater degree of political and social autonomy, their achievements do not begin to equal those of stateside black people. No Ellington, no Mingus, no Bessie Smith, no Ralph Ellison, no Robert Hayden, no Toni Morrison...I could go on. Presumably this accounts for their determined effort to take advantage of stateside opportunities and ungratefully disparage those who made the opportunities possible. The worthwhile reviews of this book are the ones that introduce facts that help set the historical record straight and reveal Als as a fraud. The positive ones apparently come from people who imagine that autobiography and journalistic anecdote are sufficient to support pretentious and unconvincing theorizing.

Rating:
Summary: Almost as dreadful as the ghastly Dorothy Dean herself
Review: This book is very hard to get through and understand. It isn't until you read it for the second time that it all comes together. Als talks about the women he's known and himself and ties all the lives and minds together.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: This book is very hard to get through and understand. It isn't until you read it for the second time that it all comes together. Als talks about the women he's known and himself and ties all the lives and minds together.