Customer Reviews

East Bay Grease

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I read East Bay Grease with growing admiration for the language, courage and honesty. By the time I finished the book, I had tremendous respect for the writer. That he lived through the world he describes is a triumph. That he subsequently wrote such an eloquent novel is a testament to the power of art, and to Mr. Williamson as an artist.

Eric Miles Williamson does a great job of describing real life for the have-nots. Most people,especially today's youth,don't know what it's like to have to work like T-Bird had to in order to survive on his own. Forced, as he expected and accepted, to leave home the day after graduating from high school. T-Bird is much smarter and more talented than his environment and low expectatious family will allow. Williamson gives us insight to what the Oakland scene is really like and how difficult it is for
even an intelligent kid to escape.

Coming-of-age novels tend to be highly autobiographical, and true to form, Williamson's own youth provides much of the fodder for this novel set in late '60s to mid '70s Oakland. The story starts with adolescent T-Bird living with his Hell's Angels-groupie mother in a ramshackle house in a largely Latino blue-collar part of Oakland. T-Bird's life consists of trying to get by in elementary school while avoiding the tough black and Mexican kids who prey on him daily. These years are lonely ones, sprinkled with a few touches of humor and compassion. Especially memorable is his friendship with Hiro, a Japanese-American nerd in his class who he plays chess and collect baseball cards with.

The second part of book begins with his father's parole from prison, and his mother's abandonment. T-Bird and his father move to a trailer next to the gas station where his father works, and his two brothers come from foster homes to live with him. T-Bird starts to follow in his father's trumpeting footsteps as well, playing in the school jazz band. While he enjoys more of a family life, his father's bigotry also starts to warp T-Bird's world. A conflict with a local family of Latinos escalates into a deadly vendetta that is handled with odd detachment.

Eventually T-Bird gets work as a trumpeter in "Los Assassinos" a local Mexican band that takes him into the Latino world of Northern California. He then finishes school and moves on to a series of manual jobs, as a gunite (concrete blown at high speed) man and a demolitionist. All of these vocations are treated with the level of detail that only an insider can provide. In that sense, the book is a great insight into blue-collar life. However, the book suffers from a curiously detached approach to tragedy. Perhaps this is because the storyline is too close to Williamson's own life, and thus too tough for him to write about, but whatever the reason, the book suffers somewhat for it. On the whole, it's not exactly inspirational or uplifting, but it is a whole lot more real than most coming-of-age novels.

Jack London appears in this book, and it's no wonder. The writer Eric Miles Williamson is from Oakland, California, Jack's old neighborhood. The writer lived a life as hard and amazing as Jack's. This writer, in my view, gets down with the grease monkeys and the working people of America who eat fast food with crud under their fingernails. Just read Williamson's own comments o n this web page, and you feel the sting of the whipping his wannabe Hell's Angel mom inflicted on him. That same sting is on every page of this remarkable novel, all of it from the darkness Williamson's hero T-Bird Murphy must overcome to find redemption blowing a trumpet in a whacky jazz band.

East Bay Grease allows us to enter a world that we knew existed, but were afraid to think about. The story is a wake-up call; it makes you realize just how good you have it and that things are not as bad as it seems. It makes you appreciate the things you have and don't have. It makes you appreciate your family, your loved ones, and to just really appreciate life in general. T-Bird is an inspiration for us all; he represents the do'ers in the world, and he will not stop until he finds what he's looking for. East Bay Grease is the type of novel that is uplifting to your soul. The story represents all walks of life and it reminds us that we are all different...but the same. Different authors mean stories and experiences. It's refreshing to finally read a story that is realistic,and doesn't just tell us what we want to hear. Williamson has guts, and is not afraid to tell it like it is. We should congratualte him for being so honest. Mark my words, it will be in Cliff Notes in the near future.

Reading East Bay Grease is like eating Ben and Jerry's icecream with added ground up motorcycle parts. Your mouth runs with blood and saliva. The guy gets to you short and sharp and leaves you dangling, twisting, laughing.

Unlike a lot of fiction in which characters think a lot, do nothing, and bore us to tears, East Bay Grease is that rare literary novel in which there is action for the characters and the readers to think about.

This book takes the coming of age novel to places it doesn't usually go - like the working-class neighborhoods of Oakland. There are fights, deaths, drunkenness and life from one paycheck to the next. Somehow Williamson finds humor as well as pain in all this. I found myself laughing out loud as I read passages to myself and laughing again as I read them to friends over the telephone.

This book comes a lot closer to daily life, where endurance and honor are the only assets most people hold, than tepid novels in which characters ponder their well-cushioned mid-life crises in the Berkshires or the Hamptons. East Bay Grease addresses what most of us call "real life" and turns its rough energy into literature.

I know the monotone of East Bay, I lived there for a year as a child in a dissimilar situation but similar abandonment. East Bay Grease brought back some differing smells of tide going out, or coming in; thunder vibrations from road hogs; recognition of faces and forms vaguely familiar. I could hardly put the book down as Williamson changed landscapes and humanscapes from sepia to vibrant colors contrasted against the mud of T-Bird's existence. People walked in and out of the pages as do people in our lives, if only we'd notice. Several of these people walked with me days after I finished the book, kind of like some stubborn grease you get under a fingernail that no amount of digging at will remove. Recommended reading! What ever reading 'rut' you may be in, break out, listen to the strong yet gentle voice of Eric Miles Williamson.

"Like a pearl is formed from a grain of sand, Eric Miles Williamson's kernel of truth about life in the underenvirons of California becomes a gem of a novel. In East Bay Grease, his words are a parallel to the oyster with each rasp and grind of the raw truth until they become a rich, emotionally impacted masterpiece, one that can't be put down. I congratulate my son for he, indeed, is an inspired writer."

Williamson really lets the story flow. His writing reminds me of Jack London. A real life picture of life in the 60's & 70;s Bay Area.