Blues City: A Walk in Oakland Audiobook (Free)

Oakland is a blues city, brawling and husky .

Often overshadowed simply by SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, its twinkling sister city across the Bay, Oakland is itself an American question. The city is certainly surrounded by and filled with natural beauty-mountains and hills and lakes and a bay-and architecture that mirrors its history as a Spanish objective, Gold Rush outpost, and house of the West’s most devious robber barons. It’s also a town of artists and blue-collar workers, the birthplace of the Dark Panthers, neighbor about Blues Town: A Walk in Oakland to Berkeley, and home to a captivating and volatile stew of immigrants and refugees.

In Blues City, Ishmael Reed, one of our most brilliant essayists, takes us on the tour of Oakland, exploring its fascinating history, its beautiful hills and waterfronts, and its own odd cultural juxtapositions. He requires us right into a yr in the life of this amazing town, to black cowboy parades and Indian powwows, to Dark Panther reunions and Homosexual Satisfaction concerts, to a Japanese jazz club in which a Lakota musician has Coltrane’s “Naima.” Reed offers a interesting tour of the un-tamed, unruly traditional western outpost set against the background of political intrigues, ethnic rivalries, and a gentrification-obsessed mayor, opening our eyes not merely to a singular town, but to a recently emerging America.