T. Geronimo Johnson î Welcome to Braggsville EBOOK

PDF õ BOOK Welcome to Braggsville Æ [PDF / Epub] ✈ Welcome to Braggsville ☀ T. Geronimo Johnson – Gym-apparel.co.uk Welcome to Braggsville The City that Love Built in the Heart of Georgia Population 712Born and raised in the heart of old Dixie D'aron Davenport finds himself in unfamiliar territory his freshman year Welcome to BrNd on Braggsville Their journey through backwoods churches backroom politics Waffle Houses and drunken family barbecues is uproarious to start but will have devastating conseuencesWith the keen wit of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and the deft argot of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao T Geronimo Johnson has written an astonishing razor sharp satire Using a panoply of styles and tones from tragicomic to Southern Gothic he skewers issues of class race intellectual and political chauvinism Obamaism social media and much A literary coming of age novel for a new generation written with tremendous social insight and a uniue generous hear Well What to say about this book Firstly depending on the chapter I was reading the rating fluctuated wildly between 2 and 5 stars Some of it was brilliant some of it incomprehensible to me I soldiered on bravely hoping that like Faulkner it would come together at the end And for the most part it did One of the things that made this book a little difficult to read is that the author employs a lot of different writing styles from chapter to chapter so I was constantly having to adjust my reading to fit That's not necessarily a bad thing as I think I understand what he was trying to do Also no uotation marks so conversations and private thoughts had to be sifted and it was difficult to know who was talking when It's a book that while I was reading I was fully invested but when away felt I needed the downtimeHaving explained all that I loved the way Johnson skewered everyone; black white Asian; FBI local sheriffs college professors college students southern good ole boys mothers fathers etc you name it he took a shot at it And let's not forget well meaning liberalsSome favorite linesTo be bullied into suicide I think of it now as lynching from a distanceCollege makes you smart It doesn't make other people stupidThe re enactment is not a southern creation We may do it better than most but it is not a southern creationAs much as he loved Charlie it would be easier if there were no black people at all If only there could only be peopleI read just before finishing this book that it was long listed for the 2015 National Book Award I can see that It's a great book And the fact that it was a difficult read is balanced by my reason for giving it 4 stars Every page gave me something to think about that changed the way I view my world

EPUB Ø Welcome to Braggsville î T. Geronimo Johnson

Welcome to Braggsville The City that Love Built in the Heart of Georgia Population Born and raised in the heart of old Dixie D'aron Davenport finds himself in unfamiliar territory his freshman year at UC Berkeley Two thousand miles and a world away Welcome to PDFEPUB or from his childhood he is a small town fish floundering in the depths of a large hyper liberal pond Caught between the prosaic values of his rural hometown and the intellectualized multicultural cosmopolitanism of Berzerkeley the nineteen year old white kid is uncertain about his place until one disastrous party brings him three idiosyncratic best friends Louis a kung fu WtB named to the Washington Post top ten list for 2015 nothing was as it seemed On learning that the southern member of their group hails from a place that stages an annual Civil War re enactment one with a heavy Confederate tilt four UC Berkeley sophos decide to engage in a bit of political theater and protest the event by staging a mock lynching What could possibly go wrong A boy from the deep South who opts to pass on taking up shooting is likely to feel just a bit like an outsider in his small hometown when young he had admired their sarcasm and sharp wit his older female cousins—the misanthrope the pyromaniac and the exhibitionist—all obviously hated their lives lives that would never recover the hope of their youth lives now defined by their status as old maids though barely thirty They were stuck here and the finality of that sentence pained him It was impossible to have a conversation with one of them and not feel like he was addressing a ghost What’s in a name D’Aron Davenport has them by the bushel Not just the ones he was tagged with at birth but the stream of names that attached to him through his brief life Some of them celebrate achievement some mark him as an outcast some poke fun and some offer respect Some tell his history and some hold a promise for the future Many of these names will find their way back to D’Aron over the course of the story as he struggles to define himself in places where others seem intent on doing that for him He would like to make a name for himself someplace other than Braggsville Georgia On graduating from high school he gets as far away as he canT Geronimo JohnsonThere are some pretty funny scenes in Welcome to Braggsville A symbol of the cluelessness of the place he desperately wants to leave behind a classmate after D’Aron delivers his valedictory misunderstanding a Latin phrase from D’Aron’s speech congratulates him on his engagement In his second semester at UC Berkeley or Berzerkeley Johnson teaches there and knows of what he writes as it is actually known he attends a dot party wear a dot where you want to be touched Apparently the location he selects for his dot is deemed politically incorrect and he is shown the door by self righteous alphas He is not alone in his choice of dot location The insight free hosts have made three other attendees feel as welcome as Larry Kroger and Kent Dorfman at Omega Theta Pi and a bond is forged They call themselves “The 4 Little Indians” Charlie a black from Chicago has the physiue of an athlete Candice is a naïve over confident Iowa blonde who professes Native American heritage I couldn’t help picturing young Gwyneth Paltrow Louis Chang a Californian who exudes comedy and thinks of himself as a “kung fu comedian” will make you laugh What kind of southern white boy can D’Aron be that he feels so drawn to the scary Gully the wrong side of the tracks at home and did not see all the darkness around him in the safe side of town How is it that D’Aron finds that he feels uite comfortable with black people while feeling and alienated from his lighter complexioned peers in B ville At Berkeley he has a stunningly beautiful bonding experience with a black counselor Where does he fit in Charlie has issues of a different sort that keep him from feeling too close to his peers as well A class called “American History X Y and Z Alternative Perspectives” sparks the crew to action After a failed attempt at making a political statement of outrage about the University’s treatment of Ishi presumably the last wild Indian in America at a Six Flags Amusement Park a hilarious failure the group settles on their larger and provocative projectThere is a lot going on here than comedy An outsider theme applies not only to these four as students at Berzerkely but for them in other venues as well Louis is not exactly heading in a career direction his family would sanct