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Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison

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Amazon.com
     Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1996: In an effort to hide his Southern, working class roots, Macon Dead, an upper-class Northern black businessman, tries to insulate his family from the danger and despair of the rank and file blacks with whom he shares the neighborhood. The plan leads his son, "Milkman"--a named he earned after his mother nursed him well past the proper age--onto a path exactly opposite the one his father had hoped. Milkman is driven into the arms of a violent, lower-class woman, into a clandestine circle of blacks who repay white violence in kind and into an awareness that he can fulfill his own potential by understanding the mistakes of his ancestors as they relate to his own.

From Library Journal
     This new version of Morrison's 1977 novel is a fitting reminder of her early creative mastery. Song of Solomon is a powerful, sensual, and poetic exploration of four generations of a family mistakenly named Dead. Told through the eyes of "Milkman," a rare male protagonist in Morrison's wonderful catalog of unforgettable characters, we discover a century's worth of secrets, ghosts, and troubles. Milkman is faced with resolving the differing memories of his parents and his mysterious aunt Pilate, while questioning the historically charged realities thrown at him by the death of real-life victims of racism like Emmett Till as viewed by his lifelong friend Guitar. Lynne Thigpen was born to tell the author's stories, catching every lyrical note and each painful cry. A perfect marriage of author and reader, this will win new audiences and reassure audio veterans that by listening to books one truly can appreciate the magic of storytelling.
-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

New York Times,
     Few Americans know, and can say, more than she has in this wise and spacious novel.

From AudioFile
     There's nothing like hearing the voice of a fine author reading her own work. Toni Morrison certainly doesn't disappoint in this recording. Besides the riveting story of three generations of the Dead family, Morrison delivers to listeners each handcrafted character with precision and heartfelt enthusiasm. Periodically interwoven with Morrison's voice is another narrator's, presumably to fill in the discontinuities that occurred during editing for abridgment. This sort of tag-team narration hardly detracts from the strength of the production as a whole. SONG OF SOLOMON is a superbly crafted novel, which is only improved by Morrison's touching performance. R.A.P. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Book Description
     Cliffs Test Preparation Guides help students prepare for and improve their performance on standardized tests ACT Preparation Guide CBEST Preparation Guide CLAST Preparation Guide ELM Review GMAT Preparation Guide GRE Preparation Guide LSAT Preparation Guide MAT Preparation Guide MATH Review for Standardized Tests MSAT Preparation Guide Memory Power for Exams Police Officer Examination Preparation Guide Police Sergeant Examination Preparation Guide Police Management Examinations Preparation Guide Postal Examinations Preparation Guide Praxis I: PPST Preparation Guide Praxis II: NTE Core Battery Preparation Guide SAT Preparation Guide SAT II Writing Preparation Guide TASP Preparation Guide TOEFL Preparation Guide with 2 cassettes Advanced Practice for the TOEFL with 2 cassettes Verbal Review for Standardized Tests Writing Proficiency Examinations You Can Pass the GED Cliffs Quick Reviews help students in introductory college courses or Advanced Placement classes Algebra I Algebra II Anatomy & Physiology Basic Math and Pre-Algebra Biology Calculus Chemistry Differential Equations Economics Geometry Linear Algebra Microbiology Physics Statistics Trigonometry Cliffs Advanced Placement Preparation Guides help high school students taking Advanced Placement courses to earn college credit AP Biology AP Calculus AB AP Chemistry AP English Language & Composition AP English Literature & Composition AP United States History Cliffs Complete Study Editions are comprehensive study guides with complete text, running commentary and glossary Chaucer's Prologue Chaucer's Wife of Bath Hamlet Julius Caesar King Henry IV, Part I King Lear Macbeth The Merchant of Venice Othello Romeo and Juliet The Tempest Twelfth Night See inside back cover for listing of Cliffs Notes titles Registered trademarks include: GRE, MSAT, the Praxis Series, and TOEFL (Educational Testing Service): AP, Advanced Placement Program, and SAT (College Entrance Examination Board); GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Council); and LSAT (Law School Admission Council.) Song of Solomon --

Ingram
     This novel takes readers into a magical and richly peopled world which encompasses four generations of African American life.

From the Publisher
     "A stunningly beautiful book . . . I would call the book poetry, but that would seem to be denying its considerable power as a story. Whatever name you give it, it's full of magnificent people, each of them complex and multilayered, even the narrowest of them narrow in extravagant ways."--Anne Tyler

Washington Post Book World 
     "Morrison's prose is a delight, full of the lyrical variety and allusiveness that distinguish a rich folkloric tradition. Her real gift, though, is for characterization, and Song of Solomon is peopled with an amazing collection of losers and fighters, innocents and murderers, followers of ghosts and followers of money, all of whom add to the pleasure of this exceptionally diverse novel."
--The Atlantic Monthly

     "A fine novel exuberantly constructed . . . So rich in its use of common speech, so sophisticated in its use of literary traditions and language from the Bible to Faulkner . . . it is also extremely funny."
--The Hudson Review

 From the Back Cover
     "A novel that will endure. It places her in the front rank of contemporary writers."
--Charles R. Larson, Washington Post

     "Few Americans know, and can say, more than she has in this wide, spacious novel, [a novel with] the rare plain power to speak wisdom to other human beings."
--Reynolds Price, on the front page of The New York Times Book Review

     "The best novel of the black experience in America since Invisible Man...It is beautiful, funny, enormously moving...From the opening pages, I sat bolt upright, aware that I was in the presence of a major talent."
--Mordecai Richler

     "Wonderful...A triumph...It belongs in the small company of special books that are a privilege to review...It builds, out of history and language and myth, to music."
--John Leonard, The New York Times

About the Author
     One of the most celebrated writers of our time, Toni Morrison has become a distinctive literary voice in the 20th Century, and her works have become essential reading in the body of contemporary American fiction.

     Toni Morrison was appointed Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in the Spring of 1989.

     Ms. Morrison has degrees from Howard and Cornell Universities. Among the universities where she has held teaching posts are Yale, Bard College and Rutgers. The New York State Board of Regents appointed her to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany in 1984, a post she held until 1989. In 1988 she was the Obert C. Tanner Lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Professor at Syracuse University. In 1990 she delivered the Clark lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Massey Lectures at Harvard University.

     Her six major novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz, have received extensive critical acclaim. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon and the 1988 Pulitzer prize for Beloved. Both novels were chosen as the main selections for the Book-of-the-Month Club, in 1977 and 1987 respectively. Her books of essays include Playing in the Dark, and her edited collection Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. Forthcoming from Pantheon Books in early 1997 is another edited collection, Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, edited with Claudia Brodsky Lacour.

     Her first play, Dreaming Emmett, was commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute of the State University of New York (1985). Meeting with favorable reviews, it drew audiences throughout New York and the entire Tri-State area.

     Honey and Rue, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Kathleen Battle, with lyrics by Toni Morrison and music by Andre Previn, premiered in January 1992.

     Ms. Morrison has received honorary degrees from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Sarah Lawrence, Oberlin, Dartmouth, Yale, Georgetown, Columbia, Brown, the University of Michigan, and Universite Paris 7-Denis Diderot. She was also the first recipient of the Washington College Literary Award in 1987 and was New York State Governor's Arts Awardee in 1986.

     Other prestigious awards include: the Modern Language Association of America Commonwealth Award in Literature, 1989; Sara Lee Corporation Front Runner Award in Arts, 1989; Anisfield Wolf Book Award in Race Relations, 1988; the Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature in 1978; and the Distinguished Writer Award of 1978 from the American Academy of Art and Letters.

     She was a senior editor at Random House for twenty years.

     Toni Morrison is a founding member of the Academie Universelle Des Cultures (at the Louvre, Paris), a Trustee of the New York Public Library, a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a member of the Author's Guild where she served on the Guild Council and as Foundation Treasurer. She served on the National Council of The Arts for six years and is a member of the Africa Watch and Helsinki Watch Committees on Human Rights.

     In 1993 Ms. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
 

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