Product Details

• Format: NTSC
• Region: All Regions
• Studio: Charlie Rose, Inc.
• DVD Release Date: January 22, 2007
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B000MTEAAA
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #307,253 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Toni Morrison African- American Nobel Prize winner in Literature, December 31, 2007

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Charlie Rose with Toni Morrison (January 19, 1998) (DVD)

I have never truly read Toni Morrison's work.
This interview gives an insight into that work, and into who Morrison is.
She speaks of her learning a richness in language from her childhood home in Lorraine, Ohio. She speaks of the storytelling which was so strong a part of her local culture and which helped form her. She tells of her early work years as a teacher, and of her beginning to write. She speaks of not calling herself a writer until 'Song of Solomon' became a widely read work.
She is an articulate extremely expressive and attractive personality. She has great confidence and poise. And when she tells about how her father always felt morally superior to the whites who dicriminated against him she hints at what is clearly a major aspect of her character. She is extremely proud even haughty. This is confirmed in her answer to Rose's question about Clarence Thomas who she doesn't particularly like not so much because of his political stances or questionable behavior but because of his lack of brilliance.
Rose is an extremely knowledgable and friendly interviewer. He does not want to contradict her even when she contradicts him. She is the 'authority' on racial relations here. However one thing she said about people of various groups sacrificing their ethnic identity so that they would have a common American identity which is their 'whiteness' is untrue to my own experience. I and so many other people I have known considered ourselves to be 'Jewish-Americans' not 'white- Americans' This might seem a minor point but I think her unfair generalization here indicates that she does have a certainly party-line on the race issues. This too is echoed when she speaks of her ideal reader as an African- American-
In any case this interview is a good place to get to see and know something about a significant American writer.