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Visible Man: A True Story of Post-Racist America
Meet Mitchell "Sam" Brewer. Young. African-American. An ex-Marine with charm and intelligence. Highly valued by his employers in his state job. Yet Sam repeatedly gets into trouble - much of it the kind that lands him in hospitals and police stations. George Gilder, one of the most important sociopolitical authors of our time, brings us a life in which the ultimate trap is not racism, but the very system that's meant to help. Not since Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land" has there been such a forthright, unvarnished, and humanizing portrait of life and struggle for young African-American men in the inner city.From the author's new introduction decrying the lack of vision in welfare reform to the chilling postscript on the story's protagonist, "Visible Man" rings even more disturbingly true today than when it was first published.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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September 25, 2019
A journalist (Gilder) seeks out a young black accused of rape, follows him and his family around for a few years and comes up with a devastating critique of the modern welfare state in the U.S.A.
Although Gilder insists everything in the book really happened, he can't seem to help adding lyrical or journalistic touches to scenes that he could not have witnessed or that could only have been reported to him by the participants and hence their veracity must be taken with salt.
But, boy! the man can write. The book reads like a novel, in more or less chronological order thought it starts off at the end and then flashes back. Gilder's thesis - that the welfare system itself is to blame for the fate of the main character (Sam) and his ilk - is convincing, especially when Sam returns to his hometown in North Carolina and meets his biological father, allowing Gilder to compare the situations of blacks there with Sam and others in Albany, New York.
Though I've never read Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" (1953), George Gilder's book seems to me to supercede it and bring us up to date (well, 1995, anyway, and not much has changed since then, unfortunately).
Although Gilder insists everything in the book really happened, he can't seem to help adding lyrical or journalistic touches to scenes that he could not have witnessed or that could only have been reported to him by the participants and hence their veracity must be taken with salt.
But, boy! the man can write. The book reads like a novel, in more or less chronological order thought it starts off at the end and then flashes back. Gilder's thesis - that the welfare system itself is to blame for the fate of the main character (Sam) and his ilk - is convincing, especially when Sam returns to his hometown in North Carolina and meets his biological father, allowing Gilder to compare the situations of blacks there with Sam and others in Albany, New York.
Though I've never read Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" (1953), George Gilder's book seems to me to supercede it and bring us up to date (well, 1995, anyway, and not much has changed since then, unfortunately).
Displaying 1 of 1 review