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Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

par Imani Perry

Membres	Critiques	Popularité	Évaluation moyenne	Mentions
216	5	125,407	(4.08)	2
Biography & Autobiography. Gay/Lesbian. Performing Arts. Nonfiction. HTML:Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction /> Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century. Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work�??until now. In 2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS American Masters documentary "Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart" and Imani Perry's multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine. After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation's first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry's extraordinary life�??a life that was tragically cut far too short. A Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Book for Nonfiction A 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize Finalis… (plus d'informations)

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5 sur 5

I remember reading [b:A Raisin in the Sun|5517|A Raisin in the Sun|Lorraine Hansberry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1165522672l/5517._SX50_.jpg|3154525] in a high school English class. With the knowledge I now have about [a:Lorraine Hansberry|3732|Lorraine Hansberry|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1234149147p2/3732.jpg], I'm shocked my rural white school district included this play in our curriculum. Hansberry was a Black woman, playwright, artist, lesbian, and radical. Although we read her play as adolescents, we did not have the tools to understand or analyze Hansberry's place in the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Liberation Movement, the world.

I'm giving this book three stars because I didn't love the audiobook narration. (

)

sjanke | Dec 9, 2020 |

Fascinating Background on the writer of A Raisin in the Sun
Review of the Beacon Press paperback edition (Sept. 2019) of the original hardcover [book:Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry|37857804] (Sept. 2018) (

)

alanteder | Nov 14, 2020 |

This was a really deeply thoughtful biography; Perry manages to balance her personal investments in telling Hansberry's life story alongside Hansberry's actual life, and does so much work to draw out what is radical in her work. I found it really compelling, and a very easy and accessible read, even for people who are unfamiliar with Hansberry's work or maybe only have hear of Raisin in the Sun. It definitely made me want to look at her work more closely. The chapters about her friendship with James Baldwin and Nina Simone both were so powerful, and the connections made between her work and that of Baldwin were both so powerful.

Sometimes Perry seems too into her role as not!biographer, in resisting speculation in particular earlier in the book, and then seems to give that up fairly easily later in the book; frankly I'm fine with the latter, but I wish she toned down the former, if only because it disrupts the narrative a little bit. In some ways I appreciate how she draws attention to certain practices of biographers that often go unnoticed, but I think just committing--speculating on her pain is frankly not that different from speculating on her relationships, and I think it's fine to acknowledge that! But that was not enough to really distract me from the power of this book wholly, and I really strongly recommend it. (

)

aijmiller | Jan 16, 2020 |

Here's a loving homage to a brilliant writer and social activist whose shine was burnished by her strong relationships with James Baldwin and Nina Simone. Perry shares all aspects of Hansberry's brief life, starting with her upbringing in a middle class black Chicago family, with a father who also died young and was planning to move the family to Mexico, so sick was he of the inability to succeed in a totally racist country. As Lorraine becomes affiliated with Communists, she attracts the attention of the FBI, but also of W.E.B. DuBois and the progressive literary lights of Harlem, poets, writers, playwrights, all of whom are captivated by her youthful energy and her joy in challenging and speaking truth to power. When coming out as gay was hardly conceivable, she married a white man who supported and promoted her but didn't go as far as demanding the end to the systematic beatdown of black people as Lorraine did. Her play A Raisin In The Sun, and her ability to rouse and raise consciousness in word and action made her almost as revolutionary in her arena as Malcolm X was in his (he admired her and was murdered three weeks after she died of pancreatic cancer at age 34). (

)

froxgirl | Nov 5, 2019 |

A “third person memoir” using Hansberry’s life to explore the promise and peril of blackness in America. Hansberry was an economic radical, a lesbian married to a man, a woman whose girlhood included living in a house in a white neighborhood that her mother defended with a Luger while her father was away, and many other amazing things. (

)

rivkat | Nov 28, 2018 |

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Biography & Autobiography. Gay/Lesbian. Performing Arts. Nonfiction. HTML:Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction
Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award
A New York Times Notable Book of 2018
A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century.
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work�??until now. In 2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS American Masters documentary "Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart" and Imani Perry's multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine.
After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation's first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry's extraordinary life�??a life that was tragically cut far too short.
A Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Book for Nonfiction
A 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize Finalis

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