Matthew McElroy > Recent Status Updates

The breadth of Nash's research is incredible. My criticism right now is that his chapters are way too long. If you are breaking your chapters into six or seven subsections, you may want to structure them a bit differently.

Earlier, I made the criticism that Checkoway gets some very easy facts incorrect.

There is also some research she does, which is incredible. The depth of interviews and archival research she must have completed is impressive. Swimming is not boxing or football, so details must have been considerably harder to find.

Good on Checkoway for making swimming feel like the center of the universe.

I want to put this in writing before I get to the end of the book. Checkoway is writing a fascinating sports underdog story, in the vein of Seabiscuit and The Boys in the Boat. But she also is getting some pretty basic facts incorrect about fairly well known topics. Example: Abner Doubleday didn't invent baseball by any stretch of the imagination and that fact has been fairly well known for at least 30 years

My high school English teacher had us read this book. I don't think I was mature enough to appreciate it. It is definitely a book where dialogue must be read aloud, or at least whispered to yourself. And when you do that, it makes perfect sense.
Hurston was writing 100 years before her time, and my English teacher was teaching 25 years before her time.

Sorry Dr. Lyons.

At the end of the story "War Dances", here is the final line: I would always feel closest to the man who had most disappointed me.

Get yourself some Sherman Alexie in your life.

There's a passage in Chapter 5, where a group of men (are they the chorus of this story?) are talking. The following comes from a man named Hicks: "Us colored folks is too envious of one 'nother... Us talks about de white man keepin' us down!... Us keeps our own selves down."

Hurston was part of the Harlem Renaissance, from what I recollect. What is she trying to convey with that passage?

"Janie's first dream was dead. So she became a woman."
I can't imagine a man ever writing a line like that.

There is a line in Chapter Two where Nanny, the grandmother who raised Janie, the protagonist, says "us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways".
Do you think Hurston believes that?