Richard Wright

Black Boy

Bria

This reminds me of my great grandma telling me stories about her and her brothers growing up

Aristophanes

Alan H. Sommerstein

In Lysistrata and The Archarnians, politics as usual takes a backseat to the machinations of, respectively, a group of women and a single peasant, while The clouds takes satiric aim at the philosophers of Athens.

Lysistrata and Other Plays

“If once we let these women get the semblance of a start,
Before we know, they'll be adept at every manly art.
They'll turn their hands to building ships, and then they'll make a bid
To fight our fleet and ram us, just like Artemisia did."”

--------------------

WHY are the Antic Greeks so damn bawdy?!
For a book that I first read in high school for my English class, Lysistrata has left quite a weird impression in my head. Imagine confidently assigning a group of 16 year olds to read about a play, which was written almost 2500 years ago. Now imagine if this play was about a bunch of women refusing to have sex with any man in Greece as long as the men insist on making war with each other. Now, imagine that it was filled with embarrassingly explicit puns, political satire, and very specific digs at Aristophanes's contemporaries. It seems unlikely, but reader, I had quite a few laughs out of it.
Just take a look at what the 16 year-old me thought worth highlighting for literary analysis:


That being said, I think that this absurd collection of comedies are only really worth reading if you are interested in Ancient Greek culture / history, and that only when it's backed with the very useful introduction and footnotes in this edition that make this challenging read a little bit more comprehensible.
2.5/5

Lysistrata

franz

pls i remember how hilarious my classmates presented their discussion of this literary piece

Irreverent and perfectly funny. This is the best translation yet 

Aadya J 

Trish

This was such a comic relief after weeks of Homer. This play is lighthearted and funny, though it deals with several important subjects. If it weren't on my syllabus, I probably wouldn't have heard of it for a long while. But I'm glad I got a chance to read it, though I'd be interested in getting hold of a more traditionally translated edition. I'm not sure I loved the liberties this translator took with the text.

Alyssa 

Interesting. Really funny how all the Greek women were messing with the men to try to get them to stop fighting.

In Lysistrata a band of women tap into the awesome power of sex in order to end a war.

Selma

Actually it was pretty funny to read. I was kinda surprised of the topic but i did like it !

A comedic play from the classical age of drama in which the women of Greece vow to withhold sex from their husbands until they end the brutal war between Athens and Sparta.

Hope Brockway

I despise sexual humor, and that's basically what this play is about. 

I find this kind of humor crude, vile, and not funny. This play's views of women, sex, and marriage are disgusting. Literally everything in this play hinted at sex. 

If you read this in a literature class, beware.

Daryl Houston

Initially, I had ignorantly expected fiction, so this was a departure from my usual reading. I found it a little slow, but powerful at times. The long section about communism that wrapped the book up interested me less than the rest. Reading some of the episodes described in the book that took place nearly a century ago and connecting them to very similar racially motivated brutality in the present day was sobering.

Alyssa Jacunski

This book first came on my radar when I was scrolling through my library's electronic collection and came across the 75th anniversary edition. I couldn't put this book down.

Black Boy is Richard Wright's autobiography of growing up Black in the South during the Jim Crow era. Born in 1908, we got to see what life was like in the early part of the 1900's through the eyes of a Black men reflecting on his life. It was incredibly well-written and I couldn't put it down.

Reading this book was an experience. There was a quote that has continued to stick with me since reading this book: "The cops beat up some demonstrators today". This was said in the post office in 1929. I got chills reading this (and honestly writing this review and revisiting this has given me chills again). We're still seeing this today. As my boyfriend has shared, nothing has changed except the date on the calendar.

There are several trigger warnings with this book; most notably racism. However, I do think the time spent reading this is well worth it.

Black Boy

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