Tar Baby, Toni Morrison
Tar Baby, Toni Morrison
22 Rating(s)
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
Club: $10.00

Tar Baby

Author: Toni Morrison

Narrator: Desiree Coleman

Unabridged: 11 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/19/2011


Synopsis

A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner

Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

About Toni Morrison

Possibly one of the best known and most talented Black authors, Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, was an American author, essayist, book editor, and college professor. She was born and grew up in Lorain, Ohio. She was the second of four children of a working class family. Her parents had difficult childhoods, with her father having witnessed a lynching of two Black businessmen who lived on his street. It was a very traumatic experience for her father, so he ended up moving to Ohio where there were more industrial jobs being offered. When Toni was about two years old, their landlord set fire to their house for non-payment of rent. They were home at the time. They laughed at the incident which she later described "as how her family kept their integrity and claimed their own life".

Morrison read frequently the works of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. She took the Baptismal name of Anthony, which led to her nickname, Toni. She attended Lorain High School where she was on the debate team, participated in drama productions, and assisted with the yearbook. She then graduated from Howard University in English and the classics. Continuing her education, she completed her Master's Degree in two years from Cornell University, writing her thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.

After graduating from Cornell, she settled in Texas, where she taught at Texas Southern University.

She has received about every prestigious award for her writing, which includes......The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved (which was made into a 1998 film), Jazz, Love, and A Mercy. Her highest honor was in 2012 when she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Donna on February 07, 2021

Toni Morrison is amazing. She is the greatest of all time (in my opinion); but really, which other author could keep me entertained and awestruck on Every single page for five consecutive books? I must preface all reviews of her writings with total praise and veneration because her work demands noth......more

Goodreads review by Michael on April 21, 2020

Toni Morrison takes a more relaxing Caribbean pace to tell a story which involves sex, colonialism, and love. It is a tantalzing mix and, as always, so well-written. I loved how the narration passed fluidly from one character to the other and how several scenes were narrated by butterflies outside t......more

Goodreads review by J.L. on March 26, 2023

“It was a silly age, twenty-five; too old for teenaged dreaming, too young for settling down. Every corner was a possibility and a dead end.” While the drama of Toni Morrison's Tar Baby primarily unfolds on an isolated Caribbean island, thus creating the illusion of a community that is free from the......more

Goodreads review by Zanna on August 13, 2016

The opening of this book was a complete surprise to me as a moderately seasoned TM reader – it felt just like the start of an action movie, some kind of spy thriller, only infused with poetic beauty. Something of this atmosphere persisted; perhaps because of Valerian, the white millionaire, who some......more

Goodreads review by Read By RodKelly on April 28, 2018

Re-read this for a little litery refreshment and I just feel like Toni can do no wrong. Clunky, ridiculous ending and all, this novel is a mountain of incendiary ideas about identity: black identity, black womanhood, black manhood, cultural identity, childhood trauma, motherhood, class, sex, and on......more


Quotes

“Deeply perceptive. . . . Return[s] risk and mischief to the contemporary American novel.” —John Irving, The New York Times Book Review

“Toni Morrison has made herself into the D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche, transforming individuals into forces, idiosyncrasy into inevitability.” —New York

“Arresting images, fierce intelligence, poetic language . . . One becomes entranced by Toni Morrison’s story.” —The Washington Post

“Wrenchingly good. A terrific book.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Hypnotic, stunningly alive.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

“That rare commodity, a truly public novel. . . . Morrison’s genius lies in her uncanny ability to immerse you totally in the world she creates.” —Newsweek

“Powerful. . . . A stunning performance. . . . Morrison is one of the most exciting living American writers.” —Kansas City Star

“It takes one to the sheer edge of human relationships.” —Vogue

“Wise, beautiful, astonishing, absolutely breathtaking.” —St. Louis Globe-Democrat

“Reminds us again that Toni Morrison is one of the finest writers in America today.” —Louisville Courier-Journal

Tar Baby is stupendous. Morrison is a writer of amazing skill.” —Roanoke Times & World

“Its scope is grand and the interplay complex. But Morrison has the control of a skilled choreographer, with a careful eye pinned on pacing, suspense, grace, and frenzy. . . . She has an awesome lyric flair.” —The Charlotte Observer


Awards

  • Nobel Prize