Cuming's Tour to the Western Country Book

Here's what I learned from this book: Ishmael Reed really hates Jerry Brown. It's a special kind of hatred too, one reserved by someone on the far-left for someone not left enough. That's the secret of the Left, destroy those close to you but not close enough. I don't think Ishmael Reed is an ideological purist by any means. His politics comes across as too messy and stitched together for that. It's a kind of untenable utopian thinking that based not on an ideal society per se, but on an equitable one. It's a shame then that equity is so far down the path of idealism that it feel false.

But as I said in his book about Barack Obama, he does call out hypocrisy and falsehood when he sees it. So the Jerry Brown sections of this book-for the uniformed as I was Jerry Brown in between being Governor was mayor of Oakland.-are a bit anomalous or atonal for an otherwise interesting book about Oakland, a kind of beautifully scarred step-sister of a city. It reminds me a lot of the various comedians I know who call Oakland their home, and even Michael Chabon's flawed novel Telegraph Avenue. It's interesting to watch someone spend a lot of time and energy learning to love a city they weren't born into. Had this not been an audiobook, I wouldn't have read it, but it was, it was short, and it was there and available. I think getting more of a taste of his fiction among his nonfiction was a good way to see more of Ishmael Reed the thinker and person versus the novelist, which is more upcoming.