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Quote by Ishmael Reed

“I'm beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of deathamong Americans. What you don't know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright's character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.”

Quote by Ishmael Reed

Book:Writin' is fightin': thirty-seven years of boxing on paper

Work

Writin' is fightin': thirty-seven years of boxing on paper

Writin' is fightin': thirty-seven years of boxing on paper is a compilation of boxing-related writings that span a significant portion of the author's career. The book delves into various aspects of boxing, from historical accounts to contemporary analysis, offering readers a rich tapestry of the sport's evolution. It includes personal anecdotes, match recaps, and reflections on the sport's impact on society, all woven together to create a comprehensive narrative of boxing through the written word. more

Author

Ishmael Reed is an American poet, novelist, and playwright. Known for his unique literary style and profound exploration of racial, class, and gender issues, Reed was born on February 22, 1938. more

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“The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes--McCarthy and Stalin--that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.”

Source: God made Alaska for the Indians: selected essays

“If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.”

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Source: Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“I've always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it's becausemany American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy.”

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Source: God made Alaska for the Indians: selected essays

“Few white citizens are acquainted with blacks other than those projected by the media and the so--called educational system, whichis nothing more than a system of rewards and punishments based upon one's ability to pledge loyalty oaths to Anglo culture. The media and the "educational system" are the prime sources of racism in the United States.”

“American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.”

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Author:Ishmael Reed

“The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.”

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Book:Airing Dirty Laundry

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“Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual "morning in America" paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.”

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“statistic: the us bureau of missing persons reports that in 1968 over 100,000 people disappeared leaving no solid clues nor traceonly a space in the lives of their friends.”

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Book:New and collected poems

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“Regardless of the criticisms I receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it's important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up.”

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Book:Writin' is fightin': thirty-seven years of boxing on paper

Source: Writin' is fightin': thirty-seven years of boxing on paper

“Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.”

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