3.5
Dreamer
ByPublisher Description
From the National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage, a fearless fictional portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his pivotal moment in American history.
Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer is a remarkable fictional excursion into the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country's most preeminent moral leader were the greatest. While in Chicago for his first northern campaign against poverty and inequality, King encounters Chaym Smith, whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. Matthew Bishop, a civil rights worker and loyal follower of King, is given the task of training the smart and deeply cynical Smith for the job. In doing so, Bishop must face the issue of what makes one man great while another man can only stand in for greatness. Provocative, heartfelt, and masterfully rendered, Charles Johnson confirms yet again that he is one of the great treasures of modern American literature.
Dr. Charles Johnson is a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, professional cartoonist and the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of more than sixteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner nominated story collection The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the novel Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award.
Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer is a remarkable fictional excursion into the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country's most preeminent moral leader were the greatest. While in Chicago for his first northern campaign against poverty and inequality, King encounters Chaym Smith, whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. Matthew Bishop, a civil rights worker and loyal follower of King, is given the task of training the smart and deeply cynical Smith for the job. In doing so, Bishop must face the issue of what makes one man great while another man can only stand in for greatness. Provocative, heartfelt, and masterfully rendered, Charles Johnson confirms yet again that he is one of the great treasures of modern American literature.
Dr. Charles Johnson is a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, professional cartoonist and the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of more than sixteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner nominated story collection The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the novel Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesDreamer Reviews
3.5
“There’s no doubt that Charles Johnson is a great writer and that this is a smart book. It truly shines in the sections detailing King’s ideological and theological influences, as well as its exploration of how he might have navigated the various challenges he faced during the civil rights movement.
However, Johnson injects too much of his own ideology into the book. While one could argue that this reflects how black liberals of the time might have responded to the radical forces behind the rise of the Black Power movement, I don’t believe that’s the case here. Those to the left of King (and the author) are portrayed as hateful and narrow-minded in their approaches to black liberation. The book takes one too many cheap shots at the Panthers and Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) for my liking.
Though these critiques don’t dominate the book, the underlying message seems to be that King was unequivocally right in all his actions and philosophies, despite the reality that he was moving further left and embracing more radical ideas.”
“I feel like I don't know as much about Martin Luther king Jr as I should and decided to pick this biographical novel as I thought it was as good start as any. It was well written and engaging and definitely made me more interested in reading more and maybe tackle a non fiction next.”
“<strong>Excellent</strong>
Very thought-provoking and interesting way to look at a complex historical figure. An important piece of biofiction. I definitely recommend.”
About Charles Johnson
Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. A MacArthur fellow, his fiction includes Night Hawks, Dr. King’s Refrigerator, Dreamer, Faith and the Good Thing, and Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award. In 2002 he received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Seattle.
Other books by Charles Johnson
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