Customer Reviews

Strange fruit

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I don't think I've ever read a book as complete in so many different ways as this one. It had a lot of intelligent insight about people and society, it made my cry, it made me laugh, it made me swoon at the love story, the language was beautiful, and half way through the story, the suspense got really exciting. I can't think what more I could ever ask for in a book. This book is about race relations in the early 20th century South, but it's also about so much more than that. It's about the need we all have to find our place in this world and to be accepted and loved. This book is for anyone who's ever felt like an outcast in society. It's also for anyone who's ever really loved anyone, whether it was a family member or a romantic love, and whether they received love back in return or not.

Strange Fruit is an excellent portrayal of race relations inthe deep South of the 1920's. It is a deeply moving story of forbiddenlove, and the inability of both whites and blacks in the early South to shed the long standing racial bigotry and prejudice, so prevalent in that era.

Lilian Smith took on the Jim Crow racial system of the American Deep South and the hypocrisy of white southern Christians head on in her seminal 1950 memoir Killers of the Dream, making the subject of her 1944 novel "Strange Fruit" in a sense no surprise to current day readers. In 1944, a different reaction met the book as it was widely criticized and even banned and confiscated - the book's blurb says for profanity (that I didn't even notice) and its incendiary depiction of a small Georgia town during a life and death crisis. Its power undiluted, "Strange Fruit" still became the best-selling novel in America in 1944.

Again, religion plays a big role in Smith's book - this time a weeklong series of revival meetings during the early 1920s serves as the backdrop for the story. In front is a years-before-it-became-acceptable romance between Tracy, son of the town's white physician, and Nonnie, the youngest daughter in the town's leading black family. Born of a chilvarous act during the girl's childhood, and surviving absences from the town by both lovers - she to go to college and he to serve in World War I, the love affair goes along very quietly behind the scenes until Nonnie reveals to Tracy that she is pregnant with his child and happy to be so.

As with most dramatic star-crossed romances, this one spirals toward a tragedy that the people in both White Town and Colored Town of Maxwell, Georgia struggle to deal with. Along with depicting the tender interracial love affair, Smith deftly handles a myriad of relationships - parent/child, husband/wife, sister/brother, doctor/patient, business/labor, master/servant, and preacher/parishioner both within and across the racial divide, when such interaction is allowed. Again the hyprocrisy of religion in the form the revival and events in the town is palpable, and even reaches the consciousness of the preacher, who, after the central tragedy, guesses that adult attendance will be down, and therefore schedules an extended youth worship. On a side note, the dialect of the "kuntry" blacks becomes a bit thick at time, but can be understood with careful reading.

White Southerners rationalized the system based on their prejudices about black people, fears about the consequences of a equalized social system, and the strange notion that blacks were somehow better off under white domination than in lives where they could enjoy all the fruits of life. Blacks were faced with a Hobson's choice - relative physical comfort gained by submission vs. likely punishment or worse for resistance.

Reading "Strange Fruit" makes even more clear the necessity of leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the mass civil rights movement. Without it, individuals who chose to live a color-blind life, those who reacted to such "transgressions", and even innocent black bystanders, who ostensibly bought into the system and played by its rules, lived very perilous lives.

Five stars and a very strong recommendation to all readers, except young children who will be stymied by the dialect, for an especially powerful novel, given that it was written by a white woman in the 1940s, when Jim Crow's rule was still strong in the American Deep South.

Strange Fruit is an amazing, eye-opening, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and often -- indeed, at nearly every page -- startlingly shocking book. It's a wonder that this book (and author) is not more well known. Strange Fruit is a Southern Peyton Place; it has that authenticity that makes us remember what many of us have would prefer to forget. It is a novel not to be missed.

I love reading books that transport you into the character's lives, this is no exception. Amazing writing and great portrayal of racial bigotry in the South US that is still prevalent today.

This book is absolutely amazing...I read it a couple weeks ago and I cannot get it off my mind. I've read 3 other books since then, but this story just can't get out of my head. It is bold, accurate, complex, well-written, poignant, devistatingly brilliant and deep. Should be read by EVERYONE! I've never been so drawn in and affected by a piece of literature. If anyone out there is having any doubts about getting this book, DON'T. I can't even explain it...one of THE best things I've ever read, simply unforgetable.

I really admire how this author is able to write from so many different perspectives as well, which shows how talented she is. This writer was able to capture the history of the south and racism in such an honest and fearless way. It is a love story, a fiction, but a non-fiction as well because everything that happens in this story is based on actual situations that happened in the old south between whites and blacks. I just love how this writer attacked it head on with such depth and honesty. Left a huge impact on me...parts of it absolutely broke my heart and just made me FEEL and connect...I'm going to read it again! GET THIS BOOK! GET IT RIGHT NOW! You will not forget it and will be glad you did, trust me.

Am still reading, but was interested because it was the most popular book the year I was born. Not sensational anymore, but interesting because of the thoughts of the time.

This is an excellent book - definitely worth your time to read it. Trust me - I am not a reader, and I loved it!

It is ironic that 60 years following Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit, we have a Dr. Dean who says he is "talking to white people about race." This is the story of a lynching. An event that was as real as the morning paper in the 1920s and 1930s when the White Citizens' Council was the dominant political party in the South. Told from the perspective of white civil rights activist, Lillian Smith, Strange Fruit is as applicable today as it was when first published in 1944. One need only look to the daily media trappings of the Kobe Bryant v. Colorado case to see the makings of a public lynching in the global village not so unlike that of Maxwell, Georgia in the 1920s.

Unfortunately, I picked this book up by accident in the library. I can accept that Smith is a product of her time, but the content of this book is based on romantic myths about black culture. Of course Nonnie is happy she is having this white man's child, in the white male hierearchal system that we live in it is romanticized that all black women, and black people in general, want to claim what is white. This story is about Nonnie and how horribly mixed up she is. Why on earth would she return to Maxwell to chase after someone else's child when she has a college degree? She does have other options. I am sorry, but this book is sub-par at best.