Blues City, Ishmael Reed
Blues City, Ishmael Reed
List: $12.95 | Sale: $9.07
Club: $6.47

Blues City
A Walk in Oakland

Author: Ishmael Reed

Narrator: Richard Allen

Unabridged: 5 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/07/2003


Synopsis

Oakland is a blues city, brawling and husky . . .

Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its twinkling sister city across the Bay, Oakland is itself an American wonder. The city is surrounded by and filled with natural beauty—mountains and hills and lakes and a bay—and architecture that mirrors its history as a Spanish mission, Gold Rush outpost, and home of the West’s most devious robber barons. It’s also a city of artists and blue-collar workers, the birthplace of the Black Panthers, neighbor to Berkeley, and home to a vibrant and volatile stew of immigrants and refugees.

In Blues City, Ishmael Reed, one of our most brilliant essayists, takes us on a tour of Oakland, exploring its fascinating history, its beautiful hills and waterfronts, and its odd cultural juxtapositions. He takes us into a year in the life of this amazing city, to black cowboy parades and Indian powwows, to Black Panther reunions and Gay Pride concerts, to a Japanese jazz club where a Lakota musician plays Coltrane’s “Naima.” Reed provides a fascinating tour of an un-tamed, unruly western outpost set against the backdrop of political intrigues, ethnic rivalries, and a gentrification-obsessed mayor, opening our eyes not only to a singular city, but to a newly emerging America.

About The Author

Ishmael Reed is one of America's most renowned African American writers. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and UC Berkeley. Reed is the award-winning author of more than 20 books—novels, essays, plays, and collections of poetry—that have been translated into seven languages. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and has twice been nominated for the National Book Award. Reed lives in Oakland, California.Richard Allen is a three-time Audie®-nominated and Earphone Award–winning narrator who is one of the freshest voices to come onto the audiobook scene. A stage actor by training, Allen has worked on both sides of the Atlantic. He originated the role of Booker T. Washington in the world premiere of Ragtime–The Musical, in addition to several TV appearances on Star Trek: TNG, and ER.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jan

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

Goodreads review by Kat

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

Goodreads review by Chuck

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

Goodreads review by Stuart

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

Goodreads review by Amy

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