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Summary: Fabulous love story, beautifully written
Review: This is now one of my two favorite love stories (The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks being the other). The style and grace of Ms. Hurston's words evokes the very essense of our sense of love, imperfection, and miracles. This is a must read for anyone. Try it on tape, as read by Rudy Dee, and delight even more as the picturesque language is perfected by Ms. Dee. It was like listening to a Tony-winning play while envisioning these full characters and dynamic emotions.
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Summary: A Must.....
Review: This book is a "must read",for any women that has ever lived and loved or ever lived. This book should be recommended reading for any women on the brink of womenhood.
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Summary: Their eyes were watching God Review
Review: This book shows how a African American woman finds her true identity and overcomes the prjudice and racial profiling of the majority community.This book should be read by everyone because it will show you how bad the majority was to the minority and how everyone should be treated reguardless of color of skin color.I liked the book because it showed me how bad these people were treated and how she overcame this by having a positive outlook on life and had an independent mind.If you like this book I would also recommend adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
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Summary: Love and Pain
Review: Zora Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is an amazing heartfelt novel about a young black women attempting to find her herself growing up in the Deep South. Hurston. This novel captures the universal experiences of pain and happiness, love and loss. The novel is an interesting, and slightly atypical portrayal of black community as seen at the time of the Harlem Renaissance. This book is about Janie's journey to find herself and to discover that the only thing that is truly important is to find out what life is for yourself.
The novel showed the oppression from racism, and also the hardships from sexism at the same time. The emotions in this book run deep and are extremely intense, forcing the reader to care for these people, for what they are, and see their struggles as worthy of respect. In a nutshell, this novel tells the life a Negro woman trying to live a happy life through difficult times. This local color reveals the struggle that women have because they are women and especially because they are black. This combination presents many obstacles for Janie as well as for African American women today.
"Their eyes as a novel did for literature what the minstrel shows did for the theater, that is, to make white folks laugh". After reading this statement by Richard Wright I came to expect all African-American fiction to focus, at least partially, on exposing and protesting racism. This was and is a worthy cause, but, I must confess, it makes reading more laborious. Surely, I thought, there was more to the pre-civil rights black story than simply fighting against the injustices of whitey.
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Summary: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Review: This book speaks to the heart of all women and Tea Cake gives men a few pointers on romance and what love is all about. It absolutely should not be read as a simple love story, as it is a story about a woman, Janie, finding her voice and developing an authentic sense of self in a male dominated world.
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Summary: Folk Culture +Love+ Feminism= Their Eyes Were Watching God
Review: Zora Neale Huston wrote an amazing book about a woman finding herself. In Teir Eyes Were Watching God, Janie follows her heart and we follow her through evrything. The amazing descriptions make you feel like you were there picking beans and running from a hurricane.We learn through Janie's eyes how the life of an African American woman was in the south and what she has to do to get what she wants.We learn about folk culture with the book's dialect which is easy to be understood. The book was beautifully written and everyone should go through the experience of reading it.
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Summary: Delicious!
Review: This story is incredible in its use of dialect, its domestic setting, its layers of women's knowledge vs. men's. It's essentially a love/quest story, with Janie learning about love in its many forms & disguises.... There are multiple layers of story telling here, too. There's a communal voice, and then there's Janie's voice. What I love most about this story is that Hurston received so much criticism for writing a romance instead of a social commentary protest novel- but in a way, that is what the story is.... it's just that it's about women's lives as opposed to men's lives. There is protest & commentary in the way Janie is humbled, in the way she is treated as "the mule of the world" and the way when she finally finds love only to be lost again! But still, Janie doesn't accept the disdain of the town, and in telling Phoeby her story and refusing to be ashamed, Janie is a true feminist, and this is a fabulous read. Don't be thrown by the difficult dialect-- just go with it, and it will get easier after a few pages... you'll even probably learn to love the sound of it after a while. It's musical and "oral" and could help if you read it outloud to yourself some.
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Summary: a great read from start to end
Review: Although Hurston's writing was criticized by whites and blacks alike, what's amazing about this book is its ability to transcend the cultural biases and divisions of her time and touch the very heartstrings of humanity. A half a decade later and the pages are still turning. This is a magnificent book. It's is beautifully written (and believe me, it is), and is a great read. Even the title is creative.
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Summary: Watching Zora
Review: This is a book on black southern culture, by a black woman, in black dialect. It did not become well regarded until twenty to thirty years ago. For several decades it was derided by blacks, as being derogatory, and whites, as being trouble making. Here is an example of what I am talking about. In one of the later chapters, two black ladies discuss their being less black than darker "negroes." They are not "milatto" but have a "coffee-and-cream-complexion." One of them resents "negroes" because they are darker than she is. She regards herself as being closer to whites than they, and therefore better. In other words, the author is portraying a black woman as being racist to blacks. I had never been aware of this problem before. Obviously the black community took offence to this, as did the white community. Both of them in the wrong, of course. The imagery is worth taking a look at: "Be careful with me, I am a cracked plate." The protagonist Janie is too. She marries the wrong guys, each of whom exert their power on her. Her naivete is her fatal flaw, as you will see.
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Summary: One woman's road to self-realization
Review: "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is a powerful portrayal of the personal growth of a black woman in Florida in the early part of the twentieth century. Specifically, it is concerned with her arrival at a certain state of self-awareness and self-reliance as a result of her relationships with her three husbands. The protagonist, Janie Crawford, was raised by her grandmother, whose memories of slavery and poverty inspire her principal desire for her granddaughter to marry well and become a respectable lady. She compels Janie to marry a dull and much older man named Logan Killicks. Salvation is close at hand, however; one day Janie meets an attractive young man named Jody Starks and soon runs away with him to get married, despite not having divorced Killicks. Jody is ambitious and motivated; he wants to be a "big voice." He takes Janie to a new, ungoverned "black" town called Eatonville, quickly takes charge of building and improving it, and becomes the mayor almost by default. He runs the store and post office and forces Janie to work for him, constantly treating her with condescension, humiliation, and possessiveness, for which she occasionally retaliates in kind. He assumes that her status as the mayor's wife is sufficient to keep her happy, when what she really wants is her own voice and not to have to live in his shadow all the time. When he eventually dies of kidney failure, she rejoices in her emancipation rather than mourns. Soon Janie meets Tea Cake, who is quite a bit younger than her and more easygoing, fun-loving, and reckless than Jody. They get married and move to a farming village down in the Everglades, where Janie gets the opportunity to socialize more openly with the common folks than she did when she was Mrs. Starks. Janie and Tea Cake's marriage ends in a very ironic way that I will not reveal, but it is this climactic event which transforms Janie into the woman we presume she will be for the rest of her life. Race relations between whites and blacks are not a major focus of this novel. There is acknowledgement of the effects of segregation in the complexion-obsessed Mrs. Turner, who thinks the black race should be "lightened" so as to be more acceptable to white people; and after the harrowing hurricane scene, it is revealed that white corpses take precedence over black corpses in the receipt of coffins. For the most part, however, the novel is concerned with the everyday relationships among its black characters and the slang and pronunciational nuances that characterize their interaction. At the time of its publication, this novel was criticized by some black writers for not being sufficiently angry or socially or politically active, but it doesn't need to be. It is a bold, assertive novel about a woman who learns to affirm her sense of self-worth, and that is as sufficient a statement as can be expected of literature.
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