About the Author

Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books including Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Juice!. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism as he calls it. Founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley for over thirty years, retiring in 2005. In 2003, he received the coveted Otto Award for political theater.

Reviews

A wild and wicked burlesque and free-wheeling fantasy . . . The American scene, past and present, with all its inconsistencies and white vanity, takes it on the chin and so does Christianity, for the Loop Garoo Kid, it turns out, is not only a black superman, but the devil incarnate and he's a-winnin' out.

Ishmael Reed is a most talented humorist and possessor of a powerfully antic and lyric imagination . . . Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down should be read as hard evidence of Reed's uncommon talent.

Literary surrealism has invaded Marlboro Country . . . Reed skins all our sacred cows. He scalps every hero who wanders by. He turns the American West into a ribald hell where iron-jawed hogs eat people, the devil swings like a hopped-up defrocked padre, and the great emissaries of Christian doctrine behave like a purple-robed Mafia. Ishmael Reed has mastered the vocabulary of blasphemy.

Swings with the poetry of slang, bop talk and a solo scat singer traversing 47 miles of barbed wire with a cobra snake for a necktie.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a full blown 'horse opera, ' a surrealistic spoof of the Western with Indian chiefs aboard helicopters, stagecoaches and closed circuit TVs, cavalry charges of taxis.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a traditional revenge Western shot full of holes and stood on its head. Mr. Reed narrates this perversely wacky story in machine-gun bursts of loose-jointed, irreverent prose, occasionally tinged with good-natured obscenity. The effect is precisely as if a bunch of black kids at Lincoln Center had raided the costume room, dressed up as Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, Lyndon Johnson and the Pope, and improvised How the West Was Won for skit night.