Michele Faith Wallace

so far just loving this show and so unexpected as I am trolling through Netflix offerings, mostly of things I have seen before. and more than once because I try to make a date with myself to watch the good stuff more than once. Its no problem watching it several times if its good. Like Shakespeare or Anthony Trollope or Walter Mosley or Toni Morrison or Law and Order, the connective tissue that holds the thing together is precisely the thing you can’t retain in memories of reading and listening and watching for at least 70 of my 72 years, which makes it a pleasure to watch again. Its like a meditation or a jigsaw puzzle. Now how does this come together? It isn’t hard to watch again if its good because if you are 72 years old like me and you adore film paired with good music and sparkling repartee, well there you have it. It touches upon timely global issues and the political relations of the UK and the US, and their relations with the Muslim World. And somehow it is also funny. There is a rom-com in the middle of it and all these lovely multicolored people.

This film I found a surprising delight that rocked my soul—the music, the dance, the beautiful men and women drenching the space and the air with the stunning and reeling magnificence of african diasporic culture. I am looking for the album for so much of the score was so uplifting, so rewarding after years of living through the ongoing aftermath of the publication of Alice Walker’s gripped and poignant novel The Color Purple in (1982). What kicked off the furor and my own little career of writing about films when the opportunity arose was a review essay in The Village Voice of the first film version directed by Steven Spielberg. Here we are over 22 years later. I admit to not having followed closely the latest incarnations. Stage musicals can often be the cure for what ails novels and films. I don’t know what else I have missed but I was glad to see the youngsters having their way with this old chestnut.

Just fascinating. Hard to grasp the earlier years of European settlement of North America without this book. I should think there would be other books about this early history but haven’t yet found one to compare. Ira Berlin is the expert on colonial slavery but Bailyn covers the time before the colonies were established and when the fight between Natives and settlers were brutal, and settlements often failed. The Barbarous Years is a great title for this book.