Blues City
A Walk in Oakland

While Reed's subject was intrinsically interesting to me as a resident of Oakland, his prose was lousy. The sentences were poorly constructed, poorly edited, poorly copy-edited, and poorly proofread. At times, it felt like I was being read to directly from the tour literature he had picked up on his......more

I knew that I had so much to learn about my town and Ishmael Reed's history of Oakland did not disappoint. Since it is told quite subjectively from a 2003 lens - Reed has a lot of criticism of Mayor Jerry Brown & company's push for real estate and downtown development - it is interesting to think ab......more

Blues City paints a literary portrait of Oakland, California at the turn of the millennium. Using accounts of cultural events, neighborhood excursions, and interviews with cultural figures and politicians, Ishmael Reed takes a broad view of the city, one that runs from the time of European conquest......more

I bought this book with the intention of learning more about my adopted city. (Beth Bagwell's Oakland: The Story of a City was the text recommended to me, but it did not cover any developments since 1982. This is disappointing, considering how crack, the earthquake, and gentrification / urban rene......more

Ishmael Reed takes us on a tour of Oakland circa 2002/2003. He examines the history of the city, starting of course with the native population, through the Black Panthers, and the '99ers dot com population increase. Reed visits a year's worth of local festivals, and compiles the many frustrations wi......more