Last White Man

This is a novel about love, personality and racism which starts with a startling situation that becomes, ultimately, almost universally pervasive, involving an entire city and, presumably, the world. At the start, it is mostly objective and is written in paragraphs of distinct sentences. As it becomes more internal and subjective, each paragraph, long or short, turns into one long run-on sentence which is very effective in engaging the reader with each character. I found it interestingly written.

COMMENT:Outrageously horrible!QUESTION: Has this guy heard of run on sentences?

I heard the author discuss this book on NPR and immediately ordered it from Amazon. I read it the day it was released. I expected a more profound attempt to deal with the issues the book raised. I found it quite disappointing. The short book appears to be very padded and the many one-sentence paragraphs are annoying.

Like another reviewer, the NPR interview led me to buy this book. Based on the interview I had expected a complex treatment of race. This book started off strong, and then turned totally one-dimensional. In other words, at the beginning I thought that the concise writing was compelling. After about 50 pages in it became clear that rather than developing the racial questions in a multi-dimensional fashion, the author was just skimming the surface. As a result, the narrative became increasingly flat.I wish the author had used his characters to probe the subject more and thus encouraged the reader to think deeply. Also worth noting is that a part of the reason the book doesn't prod the reader to think is that the author doesn't use common fictional devices like dialogue.It is a short book so a quick read.

This is totally a fantasy from beginning to end. It never answers the questions that any intelligent person would be asking --- shrieking for answers! -- if they found themselves 'changed' in this fantastical, unreal life-changing way. Not one word of discussion about "How on Earth is this HAPPENING?" And most important, how are others WORLDWIDE reacting to these changes? And for goodness sake, what does the medical community make of this? It's just an airhead fantasy! And its characters were all so self-absorbed, and never seemed to talk with anyone else about 'what just happened to me?' And no discussion of the surrounding political climate, which has been discussing racial problems nonstop from the 1960's and earlier. In fact, there was a book entitled "Black Like Me", which told of a white man who darkened his skin with melatonin so he could 'pass' in the black community, so he could study their problems. This book asks no such questions. In fact, it spends endless pages telling about the two main characters and their relationship with their own parents, and the death of one parent and a sibling. I still cannot understand what the author was trying to get at. It certainly did not live up to the promise of its title.I do have to say that the authors extensive use of the 'stream of consciousness' writing style was very well done and informative of how the person was seeing his/her 'new bodily expression' but it still needed to be 'fleshed out' and placed in reality.