Category Archives: criticism

african american author, african american authors, african american book, african american books, amazon.com, book reviews, crave all lose all, criticism, customer service, drugs, erick s gray, hip hop, street lit, urban book source, urban fiction, urban lit

Say Word! My review got banned by Amazon.com!

I knew it had to happen eventually. I mean, the realness I write is just too much for the mainstream to digest. Just kidding…

Well, I usually post the my reviews on Amazon.com within 48 hours of submitting them to the websites I review for. So I sat for a couple of days after I posted the review on Amazon.com and noticed that my review for Crave All Lose All never showed up.

So I emailed Amazon.com’s customer service like, “What’s up?!”

Actually, I wrote this:

I submitted a review for Crave All Lose All by Erick S
Gray that has yet to post. What do I need to do to make sure my review is posted?

Here’s what they told me:

Thank you for writing to Amazon.com.

Your review of “Crave All Lose All” was removed because your comments in large part focused on authors and their intentions, rather than reviewing the item itself.

Our guidelines do not allow discussions that criticize authors or their intentions. We encourage all voices to respond openly in our store, both positive and negative. However, we do exert some editorial control over our customer reviews.

As such, your review cannot be posted on Amazon.com in its current format. What I can suggest is that you resubmit your review, restricting your comments to critically analyzing the content of the item.

After that was a bunch of blah, blah, blah about reading guidelines, forum discussions and something about if I got an attitude then I could delete my reviews and take them elsewhere. Okay…it didn’t go that far, but I felt slighted.

The nerve!

Oh yeah, I changed some stuff around with the original review, condensed it and resubmitted it. Hopefully it will go through this time. I’ll keep you posted.

(While I’m on the subject, could just one person find one of my reviews on Amazon.com and click yes or no where it asks if the review was helpful or not? I mean, Crave All Lose All will be my 14th review on Amazon.com without anyone giving me any kind of flavor!)

UPDATE 05-14-08

I checked this morning just to be looking and the review I put together by reconfiguring the Crave All Lose All review I did for UrbanBookSource.com. That’s the original that got banned for talking more about the author’s intentions that the book itself. What?!

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Yeah, but naaaah…

On the heels of my last post, this is the same thing in reverse.

Instead of lumping everything together because of a common denominator, black authors, Simmons Teen Reading writes about a librarian urging her colleagues keeping urban lit separated from the other books in the young adult section. I have to agree with the librarian. Better yet, I have a question for the librarian: Why would you put these books in the Young Reader’s section, anyway?

I wouldn’t dare let anyone under 18 openly have some of the books I come across. But then again, I wouldn’t suggest some of the music and movies that a lot of the youth have access to. Sex, drugs and violence shouldn’t be standard fare for a teenager’s reading supply.

Then, on top of that, why would the urban lit be in the kid’s section anyway? Like I said above, all of the urban lit I’ve read was absolutely adult in nature.

So to Simmons: Yeah, but naaaaah…

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The black’s only water fountain…I mean, reading section.

Christopher Chambers writes about the “blacks only” section popping up in many bookstores and supermarts. In his quest for Matt Johnson’s graphic novel Incognegro, he’s directed to the “black section”. Mixed in with the urban fiction is other classics like Richard Wright’s Native Son and Dorothy West’s The Wedding. ( must admit that I’ve only heard of and read Native Son.)

His frustration came from the fact that African American authors and pushed into one section regardless of genre, time period or quality of writing. This is how I feed about it. Until these big corporations start to care about black authors as authors, as opposed to African American authors, we can’t expect for them to include African American authors with the other “greats”.

But to be mad about the success of urban lit is…typical, yet natural. Urban lit follows the same pattern that other forms of entertainment in black America have taken. The best and most recent example would be hip hop. Black artists were making music that their people liked. Not every black person was down, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was that hip hop wasn’t tailor made for mainstream consumption.That didn’t stop the music from being made in makeshift studios. That didn’t stop the music from being sold out of the trunks of cars. That didn’t stop the music from finally making it mainstream. That also didn’t stop the music from being raped just like the jazz, blues and rock n’ roll that came before it.

And just like hip hop, urban fiction writer’s hustled their way into prominence. While the corporations swooped in to make some money from the trend, black writer’s of other genres tend to feel slighted and in return attack.

It makes me wonder if there is some literary Willie Lynch that held a big publishing event somewhere overseas. I bet it’s in a book. (Because we don’t read, right…) Pit the new African American writers against the old African American writers. Pit the intellectuals against the uneducated. Pit urban lit against African American romance…