Noah Ruiz's review of Black Boy, by Richard Wright-- 384 pages
Star Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Review:

Richard Wright went from his humble beginnings--burning down his house at age 6, hanging a kitten by the neck until dead just to spite his father, becoming an alcoholic by age 8-- to being a disillusioned intellectual and ex-communist drifting around Chicago in just under 20 years.

If there's a better way to introduce the sheer spectrum of human experience this book encapsulates, I would be damned I didn't think of it-- and I didn't even mention his journey through the Jim Crow south on his way from Mississippi to Chicago.
But as Wright will prove to readers, its not the journey that matters, nor the destination...it's the vulnerability of humanity, the bridges the isolated build between themselves and the world, and the sense of American hunger which underlies it all and keeps alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

 The uniqueness of this book is derived almost entirely from its style, language, and tone. The novel is at once contemplative, full of yearning, and hopeful, yet remains tempered by social disappointment and cynicism. It stands as a cultural critique and as a personal manifesto of brilliance and great depth. The language and tone evoke the bygone era of pre-WWII African American life and the social travesties of events like the Red Scare and popular movements like Garveyism. It stands further as a record of social injustice and human suffering, of formative years which turn innocence to experience and the surly, brutal, cold, and suspicious young Wright into a man standing exalted above the common lot on a stage of human enlightenment that is achievable only through the profound understandings which are gleaned solely through introspection.
The novel is both historic and personal, and its profundity lies perhaps in its ability to derive intense meaning from every formative experience Wright encountered. Symbolically, Wright has crafted a perfect representation of his own ascension from the cold dark of the Southern intellectual darkness into a brisk dawn under the pale light of a Northern star.

I recommend this book. It is a life-changer.
It is unbelievable the perspective that one man can give through written word. Wright has captured the spirit of an era, the drama of an eternal struggle--the life of an unsung genius.