Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die discussion

Time to discuss!

The courtroom argument was one of the best explanations I have read as to the reasons nonspecific violence like riots occur.

I loved this book and it didn't take me very long to decide that. The most specific thing that I liked about it was the way that it is still so relevant today. Mostly everything I know about the era of segregation and the time period leading up to the race riots was written AFTER those events. Written in 1940, segregation was in full swing and that's just "how it was." I loved thinking about that as I read. The difference between something written then, as it was happening; vs now, when we are looking back from the vantage point of history.

There was so much foresight in this book. I felt like Wright practically predicted the race riots. He practically predicted the emergence of African American leaders. Many of them were probably already starting to emerge, I can't claim to be very well educated in that department. But I felt a lot of real-life foreshadowing as I was reading.

I can't say that I particularly liked Bigger. He was a bad seed from the beginning. He even knew it himself. He "reckoned" that his life was destined to end up this way somehow or another. But despite that, (view spoiler)[I was rooting for him to live in the end. Why? I am not sure. Two reasons I can fathom. Bigger was a victim. I was taken in by the court argument that he killed because he had to. Secondly, I just didn't want the extreme racists to win. The racism that was portrayed in the book was so extreme and blatant that it hurt me to read it. It amazed me that people ever thought that way. And kills me that some still do. However, I suppose that if Bigger had beat the death penalty, this would have made the book practically Sci-Fi in the 1940's... pure fantasy that a black man would escape a punishment of death after admitting to the crimes he committed (and those he didn't.) (hide spoiler)]