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Books : The Bluest Eye (Oprah's Book Club) |
List Price: $14.00Price: $5.00 You Save: $9.00 (64%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780452282193
ISBN: 0452282195
Label: Plume
Manufacturer: Plume
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: April 26, 2000
Publisher: Plume
Studio: Plume
Sales Rank: 7711
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
The chronicle of the tragic lives of a poor black family in 1940s America. Every night Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays for blue eyes like those of her white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty.
Amazon.com Review:
Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.
Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear: You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it. There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.
This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I was very skeptical of buying from this company because I had never ordered books online before. But on the contrary, when I recieved my book in the mail in a neatly packed envelope I was soo happy. I couldn't have gotten a better book in the store. The book was in great condition and even smelled new!!! I will buy books from this store in the future.
Rating:  -
Author Toni Morrison novel The Bluest Eye received much praised from avid readers, book clubs and critics alike. Having soul, powerful and compelling characters and the undeniable truth landed Toni Morrison's novel in readers' favorites and Oprah's book club as well. Toni Morrison proved that she is capable of penning back to back bestselling novels that does more than reach the surface level in the literary industry. With issues such as racism, self-hatred and sexism Ms. Morrison creates The Bluest ... Read More
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I literally could not stop reading, once I started.
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison tells the story of the Breedloves, a hard-luck Black family whose existence is defined by its members' conviction that they cannot be loved as they are.
Little Pecola Breedlove longs to be loved. She decides that if she only had blue eyes, everything else would fall into place.
I learned a great deal from this book, as it describes a time and place previously unknown to me.
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It toke a while for me to get the book but it cam in good condition. Wish it was faster but it arrived in tact.
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I needed to read this book for an College English Course on 21st Century Writers. Although, I was provided with a hard copy of the book for my course, I elected to purchase it on CD so I could listen to it during my work commute. It was excellent, however it is an abridged version, therefore the narration does skip parts of the novel. Overall, I thought it was great :)
G. Riley
Tennessee
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