I received this book through the Early Reviewers program. How lucky! It is a well written, engaging, disturbing, and thought provoking book!

I got this through the Early Reader program. The writing is beautiful, and coveys the overt horrors of homosexual repression in Jamaica, as well as the insidious and subtle workings of the culture that keep that repression going. The culture he describes is in many ways alien to me, but his prose is clear and makes his experience accessible and his insights useful. He also has useful things to say about the interactions of Jamaican academic culture with other academics in the world. Worth checking out. ( )

I received this book as an early reader. It was disturbing, moving, and thought-provoking. I found myself in tears during some of the authors descriptions of cruelty, and I found myself laughing and smiling during his depictions of victories and amusing family moments.

I would highly recommend this book to those who enjoy short stories that force them to focus on harsh realities and turbulent social issues. It is well-written, and you get caught up in each and every piece. ( )

I was lucky enough to receive Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh as an earlier reader copy, and I'm VERY happy I had chance to read it. This is a book I will definitely be keeping on my shelf and re-reading.

The essays in here were extremely well crafted, and a lot of human rights issues were touched upon. The author really had a distinctive voice that griped my attention immediately. The standout pieces in this selection for me were The Letter to The Prime Minister and Interview With the Not-Poem.

Great voice, interesting writing style, and book that really left you thinking long after finishing it.

Definitely a 4.5 stars out of 5 for me! ( )

Among the Bloodpeople is a collection consisting of an interesting mixture of items that are varied but remain cohesive. Glave is in a position to talk with authority on various topics that we would consider "political," such as race, nationality, homosexuality, immigration, and colonialism, and he approaches all of these in a direct, intensely personal way.

The things Glave talks about are not pleasant. Across all of the items included in Bloodpeople is the constant theme of violence. Violence against Jamaicans, by Jamaicans, against gays, among gays, suicide, ethnic cleansing, and so on and so forth. It's not pretty stuff, and it isn't sugarcoated. At the same time, running parallel to all of this is the theme of love. Glave declares his love for Jamaica, his family, and the world in general over and over again, even as he repeats that as a gay black man he is always at risk of being the target of hateful violence himself. And, in his more personal essays, there is the constant longing to love and be loved man to man, sometimes explicitly enough that when a older friend picked up this book I started to squirm a little. But it is that deeply personal perspective that makes his statements so strong. When he is writing an open letter to the Prime Minister of Jamaica, he isn't talking about some vague hypothetical. He writes about his own death, calls himself the prime minister's son, and asks him to console his mother if he is murdered.

The things Glave says are things that need to be said, and, more importantly, need to be heard, though I did take some issue with the style in which the book was written. I am not a great fan of parentheticals, and Glave uses them so much I was starting to get exasperated. The level of formality in his writing varies a great deal. Some items were intended for public consumption in other venues, as editorials, book introductions or what have you, and those are more standard in style. But there are a lot of items that meander everywhere, and even some poetry, and with those I can't say I enjoyed the way Glave writes. It's a matter of taste. Constant repetition, asides to asides, and a sort of stream of consciousness flow is something I will curl my nose at more often than not. None of this dilutes the message though, so while I would probably have never read this had I not been given a review copy, I found the time spent on it was worth it. ( )