Customer Reviews

Call Me by My Rightful Name

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BRAVO! I ENJOYED READING THE BOOK TITLED "CALL ME BY MY RIGHTFUL NAME" BY PROFESSOR ISIDORE OKPEWHO. THIS BOOK IS A PAGER TURNER, HISTORICAL, INTELLIGENT, AND THE PREMISE IS VERY FASCINATING. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! GET YOUR COPY TODAY!

I used to visit a friend at SUNY Binghamton who swore up and down that his professor, Dr. Okpewho, was the cat's meow. Okpewho's heavily accented Oxfordian English was elegant and precise, like the man himself. I expect he must be in his sixties today, and his new book has a sort of weary feeling to it. It has a surprising story which begins sort of like The Exorcist--an American man starts speaking in long lines of what seems like gibberish to his family and friends, a language he cannot account for himself, an experience like the famous "speaking in tongues" of evangelistic Christianity. Instead, linguists identify this language as the tribal dialect of Central Africa! One further note, the book takes place in the glory days of the Civil Rights Movement (the 1960s) and occasionally Dr. Okpewho seems to have forgotten how to bring this era alive, so that his protagonist's sttruggle has the dusty effect of an episode of AMERICAN DREAMS. But all in all, the author of The Victims (1970), The Last Duty (1976), and Tides (1993) has created a wonderland of a new novel.

The plot is intricate and extraordinary, bridging the gap between the USA and Africa as very few novelists are prepared to do, and very few readers ever get to understand. At the heart of the book is the simple cry of a man who is lost here and finds himself there, only to find his way once again back here in America, a country that sometimes seems as benighted as the Middle Ages, while flashing all kinds of high tech gimmickry. This novel is old fashioned in some ways, but it's a mind trip!