Take a photo of a barcode or cover
hgoravec 's review for:
Black Skin, White Masks
by Frantz Fanon
So this book was originally published in the 1950s, by a Black man living in Martinique. I originally started reading the audio over summer because it was one of the books Matt suggested, but I got about an hour in and just ... couldn't really get into it. And my hold lapsed. And then it kept lapsing, but I decided to finally finish it, mostly to say I did. I listened to most of it on 2x speed, and to say this book is not for me in an understatement.
I know I don't like most non-fiction to begin with, but I think in this particular case the gap of time period and language was really disconnecting. So many truths of the time have since been disproven, to the point where a lot of this reads like BS men make up on the internet to justify hatred. Ideally it's something where we can read it as a piece of its time, and most other reviews point out that this was a foundational text for the modern experience of Black men, especially in a post-slavery world, that is also grappling with two World Wars. One reviewer pointed out that this book perhaps became bigger than it was intended to be - it lives between a scientific text and a memoir, which is a style we are very familiar with today, but here just reads like your grandpa having grown up in a different time.
I can't really offer much specific critique - I'm not the audience, and frankly I probably didn't give the book the attention it deserves.
I know I don't like most non-fiction to begin with, but I think in this particular case the gap of time period and language was really disconnecting. So many truths of the time have since been disproven, to the point where a lot of this reads like BS men make up on the internet to justify hatred. Ideally it's something where we can read it as a piece of its time, and most other reviews point out that this was a foundational text for the modern experience of Black men, especially in a post-slavery world, that is also grappling with two World Wars. One reviewer pointed out that this book perhaps became bigger than it was intended to be - it lives between a scientific text and a memoir, which is a style we are very familiar with today, but here just reads like your grandpa having grown up in a different time.
I can't really offer much specific critique - I'm not the audience, and frankly I probably didn't give the book the attention it deserves.