From Publishers Weekly
A poet, playwright, essayist and critic, the prolific Baraka is perhaps best known as a founder of the Black Arts movement during the 1960s, and as an all-around cultural agitator. In his Newark neighborhood and among jazz musicians and other cultural figures, Baraka has also become a frequent eulogist, and this book collects more than 40. Perhaps because a eulogy is written mainly for the ear, most of these pieces do not work well as literature. Baraka too often relies on simplistic politics (AIDS is a conspiracy) and radical rhetoric ("Revolutionary Black intellectuals are dangerous to the status quo of the superpower imperialist domination"). Yet his anger at American injustice and his caring?especially for young Newarkites cut down before their prime?is palpable. Some of the eulogies, written in Baraka's free-form poetic style, might be powerful performance pieces: remembering jazzman "Philly" Joe Jones, Baraka rhymes "Jones" with "bones," leading to the image of drums. Among the well-known extolled here are Malcolm X, John Coltrane, James Baldwin, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Toni Cade Bambara, William Kunstler and Miguel Pi?ero. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This collection of eulogies, in both poetry and prose, celebrates the lives of 42 people close to Baraka (Funk Lore, LJ 11/15/96) who have died over the last 30 years. Those remembered include Malcolm X and James Baldwin as well as family and friends associated with the Black Arts Movement and Newark, New Jersey, Baraka's home. Baraka often uses the eulogy as an opportunity to indict America for its racism. In the eulogy for his sister, for instance, he writes: "My sister was brutally murdered...stabbed to death by an insane reflection of the real American dream." At times, his political rhetoric tends to overshadow the individuality of the person being eulogized. For example, in the eulogy for Harold "Mhisani" Wilson: "We have never had democracy in America!...Mhisani died because Niggers sposed to die in America." The piece on Miles Davis, in which the focus rests squarely on Davis and his music, is a notable exception. Recommended for libraries with strong African American studies collections.William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNYCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
One boring sectarian rant after another--astonishingly leavened and redeemed, at points, by real poetry. Baraka has compiled some 40 eulogies, many of which he delivered in person at memorial services. They celebrate world- famous artists, like Bob Marley and James Baldwin, as well as unsung local heros and heroines, like Joe Landrum, who worked two jobs so that his wife could be a community activist. Many commemorate Baraka's friends or relatives, his sister Kimako, for instance, who was murdered at the age of 48. Most of the figures memorialized here dedicated their lives to the kind of work Baraka admires: resistance to the white domination of US and world culture. Baraka can be tiresome; his Marxist/Leninist tirades against white capitalist imperialism and his exhortations to revolution, relentlessly repeated here, are utterly without originality; they have no literary merit, nor do they lend much insight into the people he is supposed to be eulogizing. Luckily, however, there is more to Baraka's writing than that. He is at his best when writing about jazz musicians. In these pieces his hectoring is transformed into a surreal prose, free-associative, rhythmic, and adventurous, like the noncommercial jazz he loves. Of the musician Don Pullen he says, ``Don spoke in a swirl of pictures. Like the voice of our mother the sky, when she is wet and on fire.'' Celebrating the technique of Miles Davis, he asserts that ``I was with you in that fingering, that slick turn and hang of the whole self and horn.'' Such moments, oases in Baraka's parched polemic, do make the collection a worthwhile read. Listening to Baraka is not unlike listening to music: Bursts of raw, spontaneous improvisation can light up--and begin to transform--even the most overplayed set. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Book Description
eulogies for James Baldwin, Miles Davis, many more

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Here, for the first time, a major African-American writer gathers in one volume the eulogies he has written and spoken, in poetry and prose, over the last 30 years. Eulogies shows Amiri Baraka's writing at its most personal and profound; the solemnity of his subject matter leads Baraka to meditate on matters both political and spiritual, to examine the status of African-Americans in the United States and ultimately to reflect on the nature of life and death.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A poet, playwright, essayist and critic, the prolific Baraka is perhaps best known as a founder of the Black Arts movement during the 1960s, and as an all-around cultural agitator. In his Newark neighborhood and among jazz musicians and other cultural figures, Baraka has also become a frequent eulogist, and this book collects more than 40. Perhaps because a eulogy is written mainly for the ear, most of these pieces do not work well as literature. Baraka too often relies on simplistic politics (AIDS is a conspiracy) and radical rhetoric ("Revolutionary Black intellectuals are dangerous to the status quo of the superpower imperialist domination"). Yet his anger at American injustice and his caringespecially for young Newarkites cut down before their primeis palpable. Some of the eulogies, written in Baraka's free-form poetic style, might be powerful performance pieces: remembering jazzman "Philly" Joe Jones, Baraka rhymes "Jones" with "bones," leading to the image of drums. Among the well-known extolled here are Malcolm X, John Coltrane, James Baldwin, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Toni Cade Bambara, William Kunstler and Miguel Piero. (Dec.)

Library Journal