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Carregando... The Nickel Boys: A Novel (edição: 2020)de Colson Whitehead (Autor)
Informações da ObraThe Nickel Boys de Colson Whitehead
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. Sad, intense, a lot to take in. ( ) A tautly-written account of one boy's experience of reform school in segregated 1960s America. Bright, studious Elwood Curtis finds himself there, having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Its cruelties and injustices, the differences between the experiences of black boys and white boys incarcerated at the Nickel Academy are always understated, never dwelt on. A few characters apart from Elwood's are developed, but the strength of the story derives from its understating the horrors of the system it describes. The central premise is that racism was so endemic it wasn't even recognised as such. It's all very well resolving to be good, keep your head down and play the system that way, but nobody can work out how to do this. There are a couple of scenes that could well have been included - Elwood's appearance in court, and another later on (no spoilers here). A thoughtful book, with an impact that remains long after the last page has been turned. A couple years ago I had never heard of Colson Whitehead; now I've read five of his books. One wasn't great, three were real good, but none of them can hold a candle to The Nickel Boys. We're with the protagonist, Elwood, while living with his grandmother in Tallahassee in the '60s. He's a super smart kid, despite being Black in Florida in the '60s, works full time, is dipping his toes into the civil rights movement, and is preparing to take college courses while still in high school. Then, through the racism and shitty luck, he gets sent away to a jail/school for minors. Most of the book flashes between his time in this horrific institution and Elwood in the future in NYC. If you don't fall in love with this dude, you're out of your mind. If your heart is broken by so many of his experiences, and the experiences of those around him, you're made of stone. Part of my fondness for this book might be because I was locked up in a similar place when I was around his age, and it has stayed with me in the 26 years since I got out. Though the place Elwood gets send to is much more physically violent, a lot of the mental and emotional torture is the same and many of his mates in their suffer the same fate as those I was with. Anyway, get this book and read it. I promise you won't regret it.
The books feel like a mission, and it’s an essential one. In a mass culture where there is no shortage of fiction, nonfiction, movies and documentaries dramatizing slavery and its sequels under other names (whether Jim Crow or mass incarceration or “I can’t breathe”), Whitehead is implicitly asking why so much of this output has so little effect or staying power. He applies a master storyteller’s muscle not just to excavating a grievous past but to examining the process by which Americans undermine, distort, hide or “neatly erase” the stories he is driven to tell. Even when he’s arrested on the flimsiest evidence and sentenced to Nickel Academy, Elwood clings to his faith that goodness will be rewarded, that the rule of law will prevail. The academy, as Whitehead presents it, is a place of well-groomed exteriors and encouraging principles — a place, if you will, like the United States at large... And what a deeply troubling novel this is. It shreds our easy confidence in the triumph of goodness and leaves in its place a hard and bitter truth about the ongoing American experiment. Está contido emTem um guia de estudo para estudantesPrêmiosDistinctionsNotable Lists
As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men." In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back." Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King's ringing assertion "Throw us in jail and we will still love you." His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. The tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys' fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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