Reviews for Eight Men

The average rating for Eight Men based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-07-27 00:00:00 Christopher Todd There were certain aspects of this collection of short stories that disappointed me, when I view them in light of his other work. But despite its shortcomings, it was still, like all other Wright that I've read, thrilling, stimulating, challenging, and in the end, enlightening. The last of the eight stories, each about a black man at odds with the white world in which they try to operate, is an autobiographical piece, or at least autobiographically oriented. He tells of his experience as a Southern black man trying to make his way in urban Chicago. He gripped me, holding on tight, until I was forced to look deeper than ever before at the realness of the black/white psychological schism in the United States. As in his other work, Wright writes powerfully and without compromise. He is hardly balanced, portraying almost every white person harshly. This black-focused point of view though, is his literary and illustrative tool. His autobiographical piece and much of his full-length fiction, show that Wright does not actually take part in the stereotyping that is part of the very system which he criticizes. Without taking sides, how is Wright the activist to allow himself the author the maximum opportunity of portraying the aforementioned racial divide intimately enough to grip a white-bred American such as myself? In reference to his experience as an orderly in a medical research institute, he writes: "The hospital kept us four Negroes as though we were close kin to the animals we tended, huddled together down in the underworld corridors of the hospital, separated by a vast psychological distance from the significant processes of the rest of the hospital'just as America had kept us locked in the dark underworld of American life for three hundred years'and we had made or own code of ethics, values, loyalty." More than his fiction, this collection has several comedic nuances which I thoroughly enjoyed, and never expected from the author.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-05-02 00:00:00 Haydn Washington First I was appalled by the inevitable-seeming destruction of the protagonists in the end of each short story. Eventually I learned to like the eight cynical and violent stories told through the eyes of a black man trying to survive in the segregated world of white men. I did find the stories a little black and white (in more ways than one) but also eye opening and though provoking. Worth the read definitely.