Bombingham

By: Anthony Grooms

Narrated by: Dion Graham

Bombingham by Anthony Grooms is the powerful story of a middle-class black family living in a time of great unrest. Accepting the charge of writing a letter to the parents of a fallen friend and fellow soldier, Walter Burke begins to reflect on the effects that segregation has had on his family and the effect the Vietnam war is having on him. Narrator Dion Graham provides an exceptional reading of Grooms’ unsentimental prose.

©2001 Anthony Grooms (P)2002 Recorded Books, LLC

Social history lesson and Memory of troubled times

Any additional comments?

This is a great "read" (but I'm listening to it from Audible) that brings back so clearly the troubled times of the early 60's. I was the same age then as the protagonist, who grows up quickly in segregated Birmingham, Alabama. I grew up in a lower middle class Pittsburgh, in the North, in a community with mixed ethnicity and mixed reactions to events in the Deep South . While I experienced no marches or police "riots" like he does, I remember the tenseness of our parents in those difficult times, that affected even us, the children. The narrator is wonderful, capturing the diction and accents of children and adults, both African American as well as those who just wanted things to stay the same, some, willing to use violence to keep it so.

This will make you cry

This book was unlike I expected. I'm currently taking a civil rights class at my university, and some of the books have been not to my liking, but this one touched me in ways unimaginable. I was actually interested in this book so much that I read ahead of the scheduled reading. When a book can make you cry and analyze the material at the same time, you know you have a good story. I would highly recommend this.