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Dancing in the Dark Audiobook
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(3.03) - 76 listener ratings
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Publisher Description
Caryl Phillips has received international acclaim for his works, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and membership in the Royal Society of Literature. Dancing in the Dark brilliantly re-creates the life of Bert Williams, the first black entertainer to achieve stardom in America. In 1896, when Bert decides to perform his stage routine in blackface, he is accused of reviling his race even as he becomes a star in Ziegfeld's Follies.
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"I'm really behind in reading the novels of this wonderful, prolific writer! What an amazing, bitter and sadly shifting novel of voices, thoughts and alienation about a world where entertaining becomes a means of degrading oneselves to insanity."
— Marcos (4 out of 5 stars)
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“Phillips is amazing at rendering the wrenching contradictions of ‘playing the coon’ as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois became prominent…The whole is suffused in Phillips’s brilliant, if here filigreed, light.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
“Phillips’ empathetic interpretation of the lives and dreams of four courageous individuals illuminates the thorny and persistent dilemmas of artists of color, who still must struggle to stay true to themselves as they pursue mainstream success…Phillips is in a league with Toni Morrison and V. S. Naipaul.”
— Booklist (starred review) -
“His best work—cerebral, tender, masterful in its scope and vision.”
— Miami Herald -
“Delicate, moving, dramatic…Phillips writes powerfully.”
— Washington Post Book World -
“An exquisitely moving novel…Only a writer as profoundly intuitive as Phillips could bring that shrouded history to light.”
— O, The Oprah Magazine -
“Heartbreaking…[A] richly nuanced tone poem of a book.”
— Entertainment Weekly
Dancing in the Dark Listener Reviews
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" The jumping around in points of view (from person to person, as well as from 1st person to 3rd person to newspaper article) was too distracting for me. "
— VeganMedusa, 1/29/2011 -
" I appreciate historical fiction and I'm sure the sadness that the main character experiences in this story was very real and wide spread during that time, but it was just too depressing for me to get anything thing else out of it. "
— Cailin, 1/4/2011 -
" A beautifully written - and fictionalized - glimpse into the life of Bert Williams. I need to re-read this one. "
— Scott, 6/17/2009 -
" A beautifully written - and fictionalized - glimpse into the life of Bert Williams. I need to re-read this one. "
— Scott, 5/27/2008
About Caryl Phillips
Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. His novel A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and his other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in New York.
About Dion Graham
Dion Graham is an award-winning narrator named a “Golden Voice” by AudioFile magazine. He has been a recipient of the prestigious Audie Award numerous times, as well as Earphones Awards, the Publishers Weekly Listen Up Awards, IBPA Ben Franklin Awards, and the ALA Odyssey Award. He was nominated in 2015 for a Voice Arts Award for Outstanding Narration. He is also a critically acclaimed actor who has performed on Broadway, off Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series. He is a graduate of Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, with an MFA degree in acting.