Critical Essay | Critical Review by Sandra Cookson

Critical Review by Sandra Cookson

SOURCE: A review of Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 4, Autumn, 1997, pp. 800-01.

In the following review, Cookson provides a laudatory assessment of Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions.

In the next-to-longest piece in the posthumous collection Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, a piece entitled “How She Came by Her Name,” Toni Cade Bambara gives a description of herself that perfectly captures the writer behind the selections in the volume. She says, in this memoir in the form of an interview: “I never thought of myself as a writer. I always thought of myself as a community person who writes and does a few other things.”

Indeed, the selections represented here seem chosen to limn the author's life in the resistance—as community activist, producer, editor, writer and teacher of film, as well as the powerfully innovative writer of the short-story volumes Gorilla, My...
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