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Title: Workin' on the Chain Gang : Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History by Walter Mosley ISBN: 0-345-43069-7 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 04 January, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.1 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent Analysis of Modern American Life
Comment: Once again, Walter Mosley pitches a great game. This book may be light in physical weight, but it is full of heavy thinking.
Mosley examines modern American culture in a way that probably seems heretical to most Americans. Mosley asks his readers to do things most people would never seriously (I mean really seriously) consider.
The light stuff includes viewing people as individuals, not skin colors. Getting to know someone before passing mental judgement on them. Treating everyone with respect, until a person gives you reason to do otherwise. Ensuring all the elderly and all children have adequate food and medical care. Yeah, everyone's with Mosley on those ideas; if not deep inside, at least the majority of Americans realize that is the way it should be.
However, can you name three close friends or family members whom you could convince to give up all television for three months? How about a season's moritorium from sporting events and sports news? While you're at it, locate a group of friends also willing to forgo other forms of LCD (lowest common denominator) entertainment.
If you find it easy to contemplate abandoning those activities, Mosley has another suggestion for you. Let's dump capitalism as a way of life, as a staple of American society. There, are you still with me? Your job is slowly killing you. Going to work daily is like going to the plantation, except the whip has been replaced with credit card debt . . . that is, if you're lucky enough to have a credit card. By eagerly participating in the world as it is, you are no less brainwashed and perversly dependent than a woman who stays with a physically abusive man.
Perhaps even more amazing than the fact that Mosley considers and suggests such actions, is that he presents a convincing argument for all of his suggestions. You may not always agree with Mosley (though I did), but he always presents a logical line of thinking.
Once again, Mosley has produced a book that I am recommending to everyone I know. So far, Mosley is pitching a perfect game.
Rating: 4
Summary: Down with Capitalism!
Comment: 'We [the working class] are marginalized by the profit of capitalism. We are footnotes to Citibank and the Mobil Oil Corporation and Chiquita Brands International (once know as the United Fruit Company).' --Walter Mosely
Because I have read and advocated the analysis, ideas, and visions of Jesus, Karl Marx, Fedel Castro, Dorothy Day, Kwame Nkrumah, Rosa Luxanburg, and Mother Jones, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, and Paulo Friere, and many others, I didn't find much new in this work by Walter Mosley. However, it was refreshing to see a fiction writer with skill, talent, and insight, attempt to give a piece of his mind in an honest, direct way.
I'm not sure how people who are fans of Mosley's best selling fictional works will read this, his first non-fiction book. But I would suggest that despite its brevity and lack of development, this book would make a great book club discussion. It's packed with enough insight and ideas for contemporary political thought that it might indeed lead readers to ponder life beyond their American Dream homes, automobiles, household gadgets, and Kodak moments.
Mosely makes sharp criticism of an American capitalist society which essentially puts profits before people and consumption before real needs. Thus, while people starve and receive medical care in this the richest country in the world, 5% of the population holds at least half the wealth in the country. There are people in this country who make say $5000 an hour when they go to work, while the rest of the population gets by on two-family incomes, over-time hours, and two-jobs salaries. And this says nothing about the poorest parts of the world where a bar of soap and toothpaste are luxury items.
As Mosely reminds us, 'We know how much money every armed bandit has stolen from banks but almost nothing about how much the banks have stolen from us. We are told, during the commercial, how much some piece of clothing costs, but the returning anchor refrains from telling us what economic havoc we have caused in the third world by paying slave wages to local workers to make the price attractive [and profitable].'
Mosely attempts to give his view of an ideal system that would replace capitalism. But here he falls short. He regrets the doesn't 'know the exact steps that need to be taken to free us from our entanglements.' He's not even sure it's possible. But when tries to say that 'everyone has a right to a living wage, a right to competent medical care, and a share in the natural resources that the nation either owns or creates,' he sounds to me, as I understand it, like he's a calling for a socialist system--though he dismisses early on in his book Marxism and communism as failed ideologies. That's too bad. For I think if he had put more thought into a socialist transformation of society, he could have provided his readers with more to think about.
Instead, he suggest that readers contemplate their visions for a better world. But I bet when people do that, it will simply sound more like individualistic, capitalist visions of society. It's not that we shouldn't contemplate our own visions, but I suggest that it's not that we, as Mosely suggest, need to make a list of 'what it is that you deserve for a lifetime of labor,' but that we need to involve ourselves in a process of political education. We need political reading groups in our places of worship, our colleges, communities, and places of employment. As we politically educate ourselves, we can begin to ask ourselves what could I do with other in an organized manner to work for what I think is just and right.
This political education process could begin with Mosely work.
Rating: 5
Summary: Thought Provoking
Comment: When Walter Mosley wrote this essay, he intended it to make people think about the way things are, and the way things can change. However this book was not a one-sided rant, nor is just for African-Americans. This issues addressed in this essay, ranging from capitalism in America to voter apathy, reveal some profound insights and proposes soulutions to the problems brought forth. To many people this book will be an eye-opener; it certainly was for me. While I might not agree with the degree of some of Mr. Mosley's assertions, I recommend this book highly for anyone trying to gain a different perspective of the United States than what you see in the news or read in the paper.
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Title: What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace by Walter Mosley ISBN: 1574780204 Publisher: Black Classic Press Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Fear Itself: A Fearless Jones Novel by Walter Mosley ISBN: 0316591122 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Man in My Basement: A Novel by Walter Mosley ISBN: 0316570826 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: 05 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Black Genius: African American Solutions to African American Problems by Walter Mosley, Manthia Diawara, Clyde Taylor, Regina Austin ISBN: 0393319784 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Fearless Jones by Walter Mosley ISBN: 0446610127 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 28 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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