Reviews for Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works

The average rating for Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-06-26 00:00:00 Patrick Malsberry So I came across this book while I was thinking about what to recommend to a friend of mine who's taken to dating black men for the first time. Realizing how insulting such an exercise might be, I decided to re-visit my priorities and just find something funny for myself instead. However, it's been an embarrassingly long time since I've read something non-school affiliates from cover to cover. Then I recalled reading Beatty's "The Sellout". Recalling the sharp pains in my sides from reading such an absurdly funny book, I decided to peruse his list of works to see if there was anything particularly funny that might further draw me from the actual work that needed to get done in my life. Enter, "Hokum". I remembered why Beatty's work is so meaningful for me. There's a degree of whimsy (perhaps not intended) with some of his pieces. He takes on the notion of that we, as the descendants of those who survived (at least in body) the cavalcade of horrors that was the Middle Passage and slavery in the new world, must look to our pasts with misty eyes and long for the time when we ruled the world. In the intro to this collection, he takes on the notion that as we read the likes of Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, we must fill ourselves to bursting with pride at our abilities to pen such moving pieces. Far be it from me to poo-poo their works. After all, they all make good points. But Beatty makes the larger global point that it's okay to laugh at ourselves, too. This is especially true for those of us who find ourselves stuck between rising up to the mountain-top and proclaiming a black glory that's been lost in geographical, racial and hierarchical translation and the forces that would do nothing more than dance on our graves and shit on our memory. Beatty is telling us that, yeah, we're descended from kings and queens, but those courts had jesters and assholes, too. I applaud the effort and look forward to laughing at how the greats of the past tried to help us further connect to a humanity that's often ignored as we celebrate our past.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-07-31 00:00:00 Steven Bennett Another 1-star review said "451 pages, no laughs. Not one." Well, there were a few, but so very few, it makes me wonder at the book's title. "Humor?" What humor? Signed out of our public library after reading "The Sellout," a book I admired a lot, written by the same Paul Beatty, I am unable to see what he was attempting to give us with "Hokum." It certainly wasn't to make us laugh. He does succeed in making me think American blacks are filled with self-hatred, and obsessed with skin color far more than us whites. Verbal cleverness seems to be highly prized. (The abominable rap comes to mind.) Morals seem not to be, nor much respect for the law. Not my opinion, but what any objective reader would conclude reading this book. Yes, I know: slavery, then Jim Crow. Was it the length of time these awful conditions existed that's at the root of the problem? Because other people who came to America also had terrible suffering in their history -- arguably worse than slavery -- without becoming so broken. We look at that peculiar game, the dozens, where one's mothers are obscenely insulted (mothers!), and wonder why this "game" doesn't exist among any other group. OK, I'm rambling, going nowhere, and it doesn't really matter if you're considering buying the book, so let's talk about that. A few pages were enjoyable, a few were brilliant (a poem by John Rodriguez especially). A few pages had the explicit descriptions of sex (Steve Cannon) that I used to hope to find as a teenager over 50 years ago, but that weren't at all funny and were included in this book for reasons that escape me. A number of pages were included only, it seems, for their historical quality, not their humor. Al Sharpton and H. Rap Brown were political, not funny, and both individuals reprehensible in my eyes. Why give us the crudity, the stupidity of Brown but not the brilliance of Eldridge Cleaver, both in the same period of American history? Kyle Baker's cartoons were mostly about white characters. Was Baker included just because he is part black? Which is a ridiculous reason, of course, but then, why? Beatty is clearly no fool; what is he trying to tell us by including Baker? I think of the brilliant monologues Richard Pryor did on network TV in the 1970s. They made us feel the pain of thrown-away members of society, and yet they were also funny. In this book we get the pain, not the laughter. Pryor showed us how to have both. This book is subtitled "An Anthology of African-American Humor." If this is humor, pass me the poison. Almost none of this book is funny. Could that be Beatty's point? That the black experience in America is so tragic that very little humor can be found in it? But that can't be. Not when we have Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Bill Cosby, Chris Rock and countless others. Again, I'm respectful of the editor's writing skills. I simply have no idea why he thought so much of this book was humorous.