We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I loved this book when I first read it, and still have a soft spot for it. Undeniably not Hunter‘s best writing, but it rises to a higher level when combined with Steadman‘s brilliant and horrifying artwork.

I found it, once again, like many novels of its day, to not hold up to time‘s judgment. The sexism alone made me squirm. And it makes me wonder about the strange adolescence of books, where time either condemns them to infamy, raises them with excuses on high, or drops them into obscurity.

Yet another untold history of a community that is deep in our marrow, shows on our skin, and is mostly and unjustly ignored.

This is indispensable reading on the subject.

As an undergrad, I did my honors thesis on Race and Film. Donald Bogle‘s work, from my perspective, couldn‘t be rated higher.

I know it‘s a classic, but if I hadn‘t have been on a cross-country drive with this on audiobook, I would have once again (this is after many attempts, mind you) I once again would have bailed at the insanely accurate, meticulous and unsparing litany of supplies taken on the boat, and the outdated science of the whale, which also seems interminable.

Still an important book, if only because of the movie. It does, however, suffer from age.

One of the things that I love about Bukowski is that he always said his German Translator must be a better writer than he was, since he got so much attention there and virtually none (for years) in the US.