Showing papers in "The Missouri Review in 2000"

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (review)

Abstract: American sdence fiction (SF) began as a short-story genre. Even now, although it's not uncommon for a new SF writer to debut with a novel, short stories are important, as Sheree Thomas's Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora abundantly Ulustrates. There's much to be celebrated here. A NaIo Hopkinson fan, I immensely enjoyed \"Greedy Choke Puppy,\" a story that shares the Afro-Caribbean reUgious flavor of her novels, and \"Ganger (BaU Lightning),\" a charged, erotic tale weirdly reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's \"The Secret Sharer.\" Derrick BeU's frightening rhetorical masterpiece, \"The Space Traders,\" and Steven Barnes' \"The Woman in the WaU,\" the story of an African American woman and her stepdaughter caught up in \"somebody else's war,\" are equaUy captivating. Though the anthology is mainly composed of contemporary short stories, Tony Medina's \"Butta's Backyard Barbecue\" and Amiri Baraka's \"Rhythm Travel\" experiment with forms that are not quite music, not quite poetry. Likewise, the novel excerpts from recent work by Ishmael Reed and AnthonyJoseph and George Shuyler's 1931 satire Black No More give the anthology a breadth and texture it wouldn't have had if only short stories had been included. The

Those Bones Are Not My Child (review)

Abstract: On Sunday, July 20, 1980, Marzala Rawls Spencer discovers that Sonny, her twelve-year-old son, is missing. Marzala and her husband are separated, and both have developed outside love interests. Sonny, a typical surly adolescent, resents his mother's new lover, so the situation is ripe for his disappearance. The full-scale hysteria of Atlanta's missing and murdered children has not yet become a reality, but it is real enough for Marzala to suspect that her son is among the kidnapped /murdered children. For the next yearMarzala and her husband must thread their way through a bewildering maze of news reports, rumors, hearsay and urban legend to try to discover the truth about their son's disappearance. The police show a remarkable lack of interest in adding Sonny's name to the official list of missing and murdered children. Credible witnesses are dismissed, probable connections are ignored and contradictions are swept under the rug. Marzala and Spence join a group of community investigators who seem much closer to uncovering the truth than the Atlanta Police Department. Toni Cade Bambara's posthumously published novel reads more like a masterpiece in progress than the masterpiece it could have been had Bambara lived to finish it. The under-

Look Back All the Green Valley (review)

Abstract: Alex, falls apart completely in her early forties, Peter is there for her. Each of the eleven stories that make up The Green Suit is tightly written, without sounding a single false note. The transition from a single narrator in Part I to multiple narrators in Part ? is somewhat jarring. The reader, who has grown fond of Peter, with aU his flaws, may feel sUghtly disappointed to lose his particular take on things. However, Peter never recedes too far into the background, and soon we are happy to see what these other characters think of him. OveraU, The Green Suit, with its mercUess honesty and wülingness to forgive human faUibUity, represents the best of the comic spirit. (NS)

A Moment of War: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War (review)

Abstract: It's too bad, because this book is a sleeping classic. When he was nineteen years old, Lee was an out-ofwork poet who walked across Spain playing his violin for money. He later escaped the Spanish CivU War on a British destroyer but returned via France to take part in the struggle against Spanish Fascism. The so-caUed International Brigade that Lee joined was a morose commingling of fugitives from justice, hungry wanderers, earnest university students and fellow travelers—Dutchmen, Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Welsh, Catalans, Canadians, Czechs and Americans— camping in fetid squalor for weeks that stretched into months, standing around greasy campfires trying to get warm and to communicate through the babble of different languages. The Spanish Republicans, according to Lee, were not happy with aU these foreigners coming to rescue Spain from itsetf. They felt that they should be able to solve their own problems were both suspicious and contemptuous of the International Brigade. MUitary training consisted of occasional activities such as crawling up a hUl toward men who were beating on oU drums to \"capture\" a machine gun nest or throwing bottles at a pram being pushed around a square for an \"antitank exercise.\" Moods alternated between bravado, bewUderment and despair. The men were mostly unoccupied and always hungryLee writes with such clear rhythm and rhetoric and compeUing imagery that he performs the smaU miracle of rendering this forlorn subject into a delectable book. Almost every paragraph has some morsel of phrasing or metaphor that makes the experience of reading it Uke having a fine meal. The only question that I have about An Incident ofWar is whether at times its strong writing doesn't carry it too far from reaUty. But this is a memoir, not a history or a diary, and a certain latitude in remembering and reconstructing experience should be aUowed. Laurie Lee is one of those British