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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33607000520158 | Juvenile Nonfiction | 398.2 LESTER | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
Generations of children have been captivated by the hair-raising adventures and misadventures of Brer Rabbit. Come along as he sneaks into Mr. Man's garden, persuades Brer Wolf to be burned in a hollow log, and kicks Brer Fox's Tar Baby. Jerry Pinkney's lively and humorous illustrations are a perfect match for Julius Lester's contemporary approach, which expertly introduces a modern sense of humor to these forty-eight tales while paying homage to their roots as traditional American folklore.
Author Notes
Julius Bernard Lester was born in St. Louis, Missouri on January 27, 1939. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Fisk University in 1960. He moved to New York to become a folk singer. He performed on the coffeehouse circuit as a singer and guitarist. He released two albums entitled Julius Lester in 1965 and Departures in 1967. His first published book, The Folksinger's Guide to the 12-String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly written with Pete Seeger, was published in 1965.
In the 1960s, Lester was closely involved as a writer and photographer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He traveled to the South to document the civil rights movement and to North Vietnam to photograph the effects of American bombardment. He also hosted radio and television talk shows in New York City.
He wrote more than four dozen nonfiction and fiction books for adults and children. His books for adults included Look Out, Whitey!: Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama, Revolutionary Notes, All Is Well, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew, and The Autobiography of God. His children's books included To Be a Slave, Sam and the Tigers, and Day of Tears: A Novel in Dialogue, which won the American Library Association's Coretta Scott King Award in 2006. He also wrote reviews and essays for numerous publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, Dissent, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
After teaching for two years at the New School for Social Research in New York, Lester joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1971. He originally taught in the Afro-American studies department, but transferred to the Judaic and Near Eastern studies department when Lester criticized the novelist James Baldwin for what he felt were anti-Semitic remarks. He died from complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on January 18, 2018 at the age of 78.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lester's thoughtful preface to his retelling of the Joel Chandler Harris folktales elucidates the problems inherent in a project of this sort, which, unfortunately, this volume does not entirely resolve. Harris's stories are told in the Gullah dialect, often thought difficult by modern readers. In an attempt to preserve the tales, Lester has rewritten them in his own voice, often with references to ``things that are decidedly contemporary, like shopping malls.'' Lester calls such references characteristic of black storytelling and admits they may be jarring. But his retelling is uneven. For example, in the same story the narrator tells us formally, ``Early one morning, even before Sister Moon had put on her negligee, Brer Fox was up and moving around,'' and then says in dialect, ``Brer rabbit was sho' nuf' mad now.'' Harris's Brer Rabbit comes ``pacin' down de roadlippity-clippity, clippity-lippitydez as sassy ez a jay-bird'' while Lester's comes ``strutting along like he owned the world.'' This collection is important as a way of introducing readers to the Harris tales; it also stands alone as a volume of wonderfully funny folktales. For many purists, though, it will not replace the original stories. Pinkney's drawings, both black-and-white and color, nicely combine realistic detail and fancy. All ages. (March) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved