Gr 11 Up-By Ralph Ellison. Both a jazz novel and a thunderous sermon, it offers up in its language a song of praise to the richness of the African American experience. A redemptive counterpoint to the Invisible Man's existentialism, it is a reckoning of sorts with Ellison's own life's journey and a parable about God and race in America. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

When Ralph Ellison died in 1994, he left behind a manuscript he'd been working on since the '50s. John Callahan's introduction to this long-awaited edition explores Ellison's life and the history of this second novel (after, of course, the classic Invisible Man), cataloguing such disasters as the near-finished manuscript being destroyed in a fire in 1967. The novel turns out to have survived the many obstacles to its birth, for after a rather windy beginning, Ellison writes beautifully, in the grand, layered Southern tradition. The narrative begins in 1950s Washington, D.C., with Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator who is gunned down on the Senate floor while a man named Hickman watches in the gallery. Rushed to the hospital, Sunraider requests Hickman's presence, and the story of the two men's agonized relationship is told in flashbacks as Hickman attends the dying senator. Decades before, Alonzo Hickman was an ex-trombone player turned circuit preacher raising a young boy of indeterminate race named Bliss.The boy assists Hickman in his revivals, rising out of a white coffin at a certain moment in the sermon. Bliss grows up to change his name to Adam Sunraider and, having passed for white, has gone from being a flimflam artist and movie maker to the U. S. Senate Always, however, he is in flight from Hickman. These flashbacks showcase Ellison's stylized set pieces, among the best scenes he has written, especially as his incandescent images chart the mysteries and legacies of slavery. Bliss remembers his courtship of a black woman in a piercingly sweet reverie, and he revisits a revival meeting on Juneteenth (June 19), the date in 1865 on which slaves in Texas were finally informed of the Emancipation Proclamation. The sermon in this section is perhaps the highlight of the novel, sure to achieve classic status on its own merits. The revival meeting is interrupted by a white woman who claims Bliss is her son, after which Bliss begins his odyssey for an identity that takes him, by degrees, away from the black culture of his youth. Gradually, we learn of the collusion of lies and violence that brought Bliss to Hickman in the first place. Editor Callahan, in his informative afterword, describes the difficult process of editing Ellison's unfinished novel and of arranging the massive body of work into the unwieldy yet cohesive story Ellison wanted to tell. The difficulties he faced are most obvious in the ending, which is Faulknerian to a fault, even to the overuse of the word "outrage." Nonetheless, this volume is a visionary tour de force, a lyrical, necessary contribution to America's perennial racial dialogue, and a novel powerfully reinforcing Ellison's place in literary history. 100,000 first printing; BOMC double main selection. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Forty years in the making, this saga was published posthumously; the audio version brings the listener to the heights of the spoken word. Peter J. Fernandez interprets the spiritual, lyrical, and jazz-like novel most probably the way Ellison heard it in his head as he wrote the passages. The plot, in general, concerns the reminiscences of two men under extremely dire circumstances. "Daddy" Hickman, the elder preacher, reared the other man, Bliss, from childhood. The reverend is black, and the child, who may or may not be of mixed blood, passes for white in his adulthood. The reader is taken via flashbacks to particular shared experiences that would explain why the young Bliss turned his back on his African American upbringing and built his political career as a white supremacist. Ellison draws you into the humanity of this life we share on earth using exacting prose and symbolism that can be interpreted in many ways. Billed as a sequel to The Invisible Man, Juneteenth is the result of the author's literary executor's condensation of more than 2000 pages of text. Highly recommended for all libraries.ÄKristin M. Jacobi, Eastern Connecticut State Univ., Willimantic (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

One of the major publishing events of the season is the Random House release of the second novel by the esteemed Ralph Ellison, whose classic Invisible Man appeared back in 1952. Ellison had been at work on Juneteenth (which, by the way, refers to the day in 1865 when black slaves in Texas finally learned of their emancipation, effective two years previous) since 1954 and worked on it slowly and deliberately over several decades, until a house fire in 1967 destroyed a large portion of the manuscript. He went back to work but died (in 1994) before completely finishing his task. What is being published, then, is more or less an extract from his hundreds and hundreds of manuscript pages--an extract that definitely has the feel of a whole, finished work. It's a novel of race and racial identity. The story itself revolves around the relationship between Reverend Alonzo Hickman, former jazzman, and Bliss, the little boy he raises, who is of "indefinite" race but looks white, and who, after he has run away from Hickman, becomes not only a filmmaker but then a U.S. senator, calling himself Adam Sunraider. The resumption of their relationship is effected by a strange set of circumstances: Hickman fears for Bliss' safety, goes to Washington to warn him of possible doom, witnesses an assassination attempt, and, at Bliss' bedside, remembers with him the life they had together. In this dreamlike novel, images fly at the reader fast and furious, swirl around, and refuse to settle into a strict, straight narrative pattern. But the cumulative effect is powerful. All public libraries should seriously consider purchasing it. --Brad Hooper