Regular marked price: $17.00Discount Price: $11.56
Cost Savings: $5.44 (32%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5209
EAN num: 9780809015504
ISBN number: 0809015501
Label: Hill and Wang
Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 406
Printing Date: August 01, 1993
Publishing house: Hill and Wang
Sale Popularity Level: 331021
Studio: Hill and Wang
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s.
His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around the often strange and always exciting world he loves.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
Mr. Hughes, in my opinion, is the best African American writer, whom describes the life as a balck man traveling throughout the world. This book is poignant and evokes a sense constant despair and the writer confronts different predjudice throughout the world.
Rated by buyers -
When I started writing here on Amazon reviews I was thinking of placing pieces of my memory from books that shaped our family so that my daughter who was reading and living on-line might share a few minutes with me as I reflected back on things that might tell the stories of us. Being very ill it seemed a logical kind of thing to do. One of the reasons I waited until Christmas to write this particular piece was it fits, the title of this story taken from an Appalachian melody of Christmas, among the most beautiful I know for my playing on dulcimer. The tune which inspired his title is just a simple,hill country piece of handiwork. The other reason I waited was having made an Amazon friend who is inspired at a fundamental level by Hughes and who is dear to me, it gave me awhile to think about what to say here of this book. I know he lives in close connection to Hughes spirit and may indeed embody and carry this work and truth. Not an easy thing at all...but the world is better for this. I hate to do it a disservice and I'm inadequate to the task, and yet the book is among my most favorite ever read. I'm surprised that it isn't reviewed by many more here , this volume for me one of the most amazing secrets ever kept. It is an autobiographical journey, a tale from his life; it serves to create inner spaces, visceral visual ones, to consider Hughes and to look upon his perspectives. All I can conclude is something I find tonight as I type, it's daunting to write to the book and do it any real justice. It is worth purchasing for anyone, especially for someone who loves to read of the times of our lives in the 20th century..
Hughes opens the book, which covers time from 1931 to 1938 as a piece to carry on from The Big Sea his very first autobiographical work. As I read them out of order I cannot say I am sorry this was my first. It stays solidly in my head. He tells of traveling in a car on a reading tour in the South and the west. On opening the tale of wandering we are where he was reading his work in small often rural settings and revealing grey community and his meager circumstances as he was essentially becoming the writer. He becomes involved in a film project and goes to the Soviet Union which is such an amazing thing to read....it is a project that doesn't work out and he stays and continues traveling. Just to know more about this time in history from his perspective in areas we could not know enough about is worth the book....and it is these observations and how he finally returns to the US, I found the most compelling of the narrative. I felt I was wandering, wandering free of some of the limitations of American political shaping, looking at the Soviets as they took on the start of building their country, listening to Hughes describe the adventure, what he sees. Hughes is not given to excessive internal dialog, he is almost remarkably absent of this-which of course is a vehicle he creates-he relates what he sees and it has a kind of universal journey construction...almost ...so perfectly of those times, so completely crafted that I lose my "self" in the pages...I am a train, or a days delicious seafood with boiled bananas and Spanish rice learning to rumba. I am ill equipped to summarize but Hughes is a genius, creating a kind of tableau that for me stands as visually there as the great human artists of these times, this he does so easily. And I feel this trip across Russia as an experience. I think what moves me is that Hughes recounts human interaction, the simplicity, the everyday as it might be felt by myself or was felt by himself. I've spent most all of my life living in teaching in ordinary everyday, poorer worlds by choice learning of the dignity and indignity, suffering, laughing, discovering others, in the valid and real lives of ordinary people. It makes me anecdotal and determined to honor lives. And I note in the book foreword him stating, "I've now cut out all the impersonal stuff down to a running narrative with me in the middle of every page...the kind of intense condensation that, of course, keeps an autobiography from being entirely true, in that nobody's life is pure essence without pulp, waste matter , and rind-which art, of course, throws in the trash can." Ah always genius.
Because I had read a great deal of these times interested in Lillian Hellman and many other figures, his recounting his story with Arthur Koestler was so interesting. Again threaded through this personal anecdote was so much good information and his perspective. He talks of Haiti and I've given these pages many times to friends connected to this country, of Cuba, China and Japan ending in Carmel in an area I lived with close life there for 9 years, which was remarkable for me as I very first encountered the book reading it sitting in a bookshop in Carmel and wandering the streets reading and thinking and enjoying thoughts of his times there. These were times of Communism, Marxism, the Scottsboro ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
As the sequel to "The Big Sea", Mr.Hughes again speaks the language of a poet so well that he makes the reading of his life seem like a first-person experience. After his travels on several ships and the taste of his very first successes(and failures), he simply explores and writes: of Paris, Russia, and Cuba, and shares his experiences with the reader. His writing is so rich and vivid that he makes every location in the world seem like poetry in motion. This book and "The Big Sea" should definitely be on reading lists everywhere-or, if you have a friend or relative who feels like they're a "wandering spirit", these books would make great gifts. Mr.Hughes touches on everything human: from the strained relationship with his father to the blatant racism he encounters everyday; to the women he becomes fond of and his neverending thirst for experience and knowledge; to the countless sights of wonder in the world that one never sees when they are ignorant. Beautiful writing by a true poet.
Rated by buyers -
IN THIS BOOK , MR. HUGHES REALLY OPENS UP AND LETS THE READER INTO HIS WORLD. IT IS NOT HARD TO IMAGINE BEING IN THE PLACES THAT HE DESCRIBES. THE EVENTS AND CHARACTERS POP OUT AT YOU. THIS BOOK IS AN ENJOYABLE READ
Find other books like this one:
