Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Cornelius' beautiful, Italian American mother has left him with his father, Herman, an African American from Mississippi who works as a projectionist in a rundown East Village theater screening silent films, but whose true calling is studying history. When Herman's health fails, Cornelius covertly takes over his job. Solitary and scholarly, he acquires a radical education from his philosopher father, who tells him, There is no true event, Cornelius, only a series of occurrences open to interpretation. Cornered and desperate, Cornelius commits a serious crime; succumbs to the rough bewitchment of an investigating policewoman; then escapes, eventually surfacing as Professor John Woman at a private university run by a secret society in the southwestern desert. His unnervingly innovative and democratizing approach to teaching history earns him adoration and hate; then, inevitably, his hidden past erupts. After launching his promising new series featuring PI Joe King Oliver with Down the River unto the Sea (2018), Mosley is at his commanding, comfort-zone-blasting best in this heady tale of a fugitive genius. His hero's lectures are marvels of intellectual pyrotechnics and provocative inquiries; intense sex scenes raise questions about gender roles and intimacy; and John Woman's increasingly drastic predicament and complex moral quandary precipitate arresting insights into race, freedom, power, and the stories we tell to try to make sense of the ceaseless torrent of human conflict and desire. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Versatile, masterful Mosley is a reader magnet, and this collision of crime and academic jousting will incite special interest.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Mosley's offbeat and insightful novel (following Down the River unto the Sea), 16-year-old New Yorker Cornelius "CC" Jones-the brilliant son of an Italian-American flirt and an older black autodidact-spends his evenings in the early 1990s working his father's job in a downtown theater while his father is ill at home. One night, in a moment of violence, CC kills the theater's landlord; the crime will haunt him forever. He soon leaves New York under the new identity of John Woman and goes on to study at elite universities, creating a new intellectual movement around the unreliable nature of history. His skills and area of expertise lead him to the New University of the Southwest, a liberal college funded and staffed by members of a mysterious organization known as the Platinum Path, who have taken quite the interest in John and in the defining moments of his childhood and true past. Fast paced but still full of provocative questions about society, the story grounds the wilder aspects of its plot by providing a fascinating cast of endearing characters. Mosley's novel is one to savor, and an unpredictable, unabashedly strange good time. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis Agency. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this intellectually exciting work, Mystery Grand Master Mosley creates a different kind of suspense as Cornelius Jones, son of a passionate Italian American mother and autodidact African American father, remakes himself after terrible loss and a moment of violence in his teenage years. During his father's prolonged final illness, with his mother having vanished, young Cornelius surreptitiously took over his father's job at a silent movie theater in New York. An incident there led to his meeting Det. Colette Margolis and his first, tough sexual relationship; with his father's death, he worked his way swiftly through higher education. Eventually, Cornelius remakes himself as Professor John Woman, inspired by his father's example to teach his students that while history is indeed an incontrovertible series of events, it's made of too many trillions of stories to grasp. He ends up teaching his brand of deconstructionist history at a Southwestern university, where he's loved by his select handful of students, reviled by the administration, and targeted by a mystical group as perfect for their needs, even as his own history circles back to get him. VERDICT Highly recommended for all smart readers.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The versatile, justly celebrated creator of Easy Rawlins, Leonid McGill, and other iconic crime solvers raises the stakes with this tightly wound combination of psychological suspense and philosophic inquiry.Every now and then, Mosley (Down the River Unto the Sea, 2018, etc.) likes to pitch a change-up to his detective novel devotees with forays into racy melodrama (Debbie Doesn't Do It Any More, 2014) and science fiction (Inside a Silver Box, 2015). Here he weaves elements of both the erotic and the speculative into a taut, riveting, and artfully edgy saga of a charismatic and controversial history professor at a mythical southwestern university. If his name, which is the same as the novel's, sounds like an alias, it is an alias: In a previous life, John Woman's name was Cornelius Jones, a shy teenage bookworm filling in for his invalid father, Herman, a projectionist in a silent-movie repertory theater in Manhattan's East Village. Cornelius, or CC, finds his unassuming life disrupted when the theater's owner barges into the projection booth threatening to fire his dad. CC kills the owner and hides his corpse in a trunk that he stows in a built-in bookcase concealed from view. After his father dies, Cornelius changes his identity, attends both City College and Harvard, and eventually heads for the New University of the Southwest, where, as professor Woman, he achieves a reputation as a demanding instructor of "deconstructionist historical devices," intended to challenge students to think outside conventional definitions of recorded time. Woman's provocative approach to his subject bewilders most of his students (at first) while ticking off fellow faculty members enough to look for any reason to dismiss him. In the meantime, Woman makes things hotter for himself with an affair with a student and is chilled by the enigmatic shadows stalking him, whether it's a mysterious billionaire auditing his class or anonymous notes he finds on his kitchen table alluding to his deadly past.Somehow, it makes sense that when Walter Mosley puts forth a novel of ideas, it arrives with the unexpected force of a left hook and the metallic gleam of a new firearm. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
