Deacon King Kong

Deacon King Kong

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  • Type：Epub+TxT+PDF+Mobi
  • Create Date：2020-03-09 04:10:18
  • Update Date：2025-09-08
  • Status：finish
  • Author：James McBride
  • Environment：PC/Android/iPhone/iPad/Kindle

Editor Reviews

…deeply felt, beautifully written and profoundly humane; McBride's ability to inhabit his characters' foibled, all-too-human interiority helps transform a fine book into a great one. He has written beautifully before…But Deacon King Kong reads like he's tapped a whole fresh seam of inspiration and verve. It's clear that he's having a blast, and his spirit of funning irreverence supercharges the entire narrative like home-brewed black lightning…For all the laughs, [McBride] never loses sight of the terrible longitudinal harm that African diasporic and Latine peoples have suffered in the New World. He doesn't just pivot from the humor to the agony; he seems to deploy both modes at once, and it speaks to his talents that he does so with dexterous aplomb…What lingers after the last page of this terrific novel is not laughter or thunderbolts or the endless resilience of communities of color but something far more unsettling: grief, like the sound of many waters, wide, dark, deep.

The New York Times Book Review - Junot Díaz

Reviews

gmcootie ，

Deacon King Kong is the first book I have ever read written by author James McBride, but just a page in I knew I was going to love it, and I did. The story starts in September 1969, when Sportcoat, an old drunken church deacon who lost his wife a few years ago but still sees and talks to her, living in one of the New York housing projects, decides one day for some unknown reason to shoot the project’s young drug dealer. At point-blank range and in front of plenty of witnesses. The story just takes off from there. It is difficult to pull together a seemingly mostly unrelated cast of characters, events, background, history into a set of coherent, cohesive stories and then weave those threads into a cohesive novel, but James McBride has done it with what looks like ease. All the side trips to discuss supporting characters and their pasts are just long enough, just tantalizing enough to keep your interest, add to the big picture, and not get off track and become boring or distracting. Deacon King Kong looks at Sportcoat, the witnesses to the shooting and those affected by it, as well as the time, the place, the culture, the society, the turmoil. It’s a satisfyingly close-up look at life in the projects, and life in general, about people who have made choices in life – or who have had life make choices for them. McBride is a masterful storyteller, creating vivid characters and scenarios and a tale that is both funny and moving. Thanks to Penguin Random House for providing an advance copy of Deacon King Kong for my reading pleasure and honest review. All opinions are my own. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and James McBride has become one of my must-read authors.

gmcootie ，

Deacon King Kong is the first book I have ever read written by author James McBride, but just a page in I knew I was going to love it, and I did. The story starts in September 1969, when Sportcoat, an old drunken church deacon who lost his wife a few years ago but still sees and talks to her, living in one of the New York housing projects, decides one day for some unknown reason to shoot the project’s young drug dealer. At point-blank range and in front of plenty of witnesses. The story just takes off from there. It is difficult to pull together a seemingly mostly unrelated cast of characters, events, background, history into a set of coherent, cohesive stories and then weave those threads into a cohesive novel, but James McBride has done it with what looks like ease. All the side trips to discuss supporting characters and their pasts are just long enough, just tantalizing enough to keep your interest, add to the big picture, and not get off track and become boring or distracting. Deacon King Kong looks at Sportcoat, the witnesses to the shooting and those affected by it, as well as the time, the place, the culture, the society, the turmoil. It’s a satisfyingly close-up look at life in the projects, and life in general, about people who have made choices in life – or who have had life make choices for them. McBride is a masterful storyteller, creating vivid characters and scenarios and a tale that is both funny and moving. Thanks to Penguin Random House for providing an advance copy of Deacon King Kong for my reading pleasure and honest review. All opinions are my own. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and James McBride has become one of my must-read authors.