Those Bones Are Not My Child
by Toni Cade Bambara
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Description
In Atlanta, a black woman searches for her missing son with help from volunteers of the city's committee to stop child murders. Suspected is a Ku Klux Klan porn ring. A look at the lot of the black working class in urban America.Tags
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Member Reviews
Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Haunting, fictionalized account describing racist terror that stalked Atlanta during the early 1980's as over 40 African American children were tortured and murdered. Insightful into racial issues of a vibrant city with an active African American community." 2022 comment - surprise that so little is online about this book; not even list in the NY Public Library catalog! Will it be discovered an more appreciated later in time?
I really wanted to love this book, but I can't force myself to read it anymore or keep pretending that I'm going to finish it. It has some engaging moments, but it's mostly too all over the place and hard to follow. DNF around page 285.
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100 Best Thrillers of All Time
100 works; 6 members
Author Information
22+ Works 1,794 Members
Toni Cade Bambara, a well-known teacher, writer, and social activist, was born on March 25, 1939, in New York. Bambara's mother was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and fostered creativity in her daughter. After graduating from Queens College in 1959, Bambara worked as a social investigator for the New York Department of Welfare. This show more experience influenced her writing and reflected her interest in the welfare of the black community. Bambara returned to school, receiving her MA from City College of New York in 1965, where she taught until 1969. It was in the 1970s that Bambara wrote her most important works, including Black Woman, Southern Black Utterances Today, and Gorilla My Love. Bambara's works are frequently written in black street dialect and are set in the rural South and the urban North. She is interested in the identities and experiences of the black community and writes about their effects as a society. She has also authored several film and television scripts. Bambara is a frequent guest lecturer, visiting professor, and community leader. She received an American Book Award in 1981 Her novel The Salt Eaters (1980) is centered around a healing event that coincides with a community festival in the fictional city of Claybourne, Georgia. The novel Those Bones Are Not My Child or If Blessings Come (title of the manuscript), was published posthumously in 1999. It deals with the disappearance and murder of forty black children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. It was called her masterpiece by Toni Morrison, who edited it and also gathered some of Bambara's short stories, essays, and interviews in the volume Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays & Conversations. (Vintage, 1996). Toni Cade Bambara was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1993 and died of it in 1995, at age 56. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Has as a student's study guide
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Those Bones Are Not My Child
- Original publication date
- 1999
- Important places
- Atlanta, Georgia, USA
- Epigraph
- We are the light we are robbed of each timeone of us ist lost.
- First words
- You're on the porch with the broom sweeping the same spot, getting the same sounds - dry straw against dry leaf caught in the loose-dirt crevice of the cement tiles.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)They must have foreseen that you two would need an extension of the Independence Day celebrations.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 254
- Popularity
- 127,573
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.58)
- Languages
- English, French
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 9
- ASINs
- 2
