BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Truth About Harry’ by J. Paul Ghetto


I drove up Winchester Road (in Southeast Memphis, Tennessee) toward Mendenhall Road looking for a Wal-Mart store to buy socks. I’d left the Benjamin L. Hooks Public Library with plenty on my mind still thinking about a book which had caught my attention, in its introduction, a man, the author, who’d spent time in prison. He described how he’d had sex with other men while in prison, but he, as a heterosexual, did not really derive any sexual pleasure from the men he had sex with. He explained in graphic detail what is was like to penetrate another man, and why the act, for him, to stick his dick in another man’s ass, had meant nothing more than the desire to dominate control and power over the individual, “to break him,” he wrote. I thought about the ways in which men think about the power of their sex organs. My cell phone buzzed as I finished my last Belvita breakfast biscuit, washed it down with the final swallow of sweet creamy coffee, before swiping my phone to glance quickly at the notification just received: an email from Detroit author J. Paul Ghetto with a fresh Kindle copy attachment of his recently released novel, The Truth About Harry Goodman.

Book Review: Angela Flournoys The Turner House


But. More important is that I found my own family story in this novel, particularly the one of men, many men in my family (maternal and paternal), how they came to the north for industrial jobs, leaving behind families of wives, sons and daughters, never to return, seduced by big lights, equal rights, sturdy paychecks, Paradise Valley, and sexy, sultry women like Odella Wither. The anguishing alienation of migrant dislocation is captured quite well in this novel (i.e page 112). So you gotta love this novel, even with its flaws and mistakes, it's still worth the read.

2014 in review


The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here's an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,600 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many …