The MONTREAL REVIEW OF BOOKS, summer edition, leads off with a long interview with Ishmael Reed as well as a video-taped interview recorded while he was in Montreal in April.

Jill Nelson, prize-winning journalist and novelist calls the book brilliant. She talks with Ishmael Reed about Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media in the NAACP’s organ  The DEFENDERS online.

The Montreal Gazette writes: “The new book levels the charge that American mainstream media, dominated by white conservative-minded pundits, have set on a mission to “break” the country’s first black president whose progressive ideals and objectives are anathema to the entrenched white moneyed establishment, which owns big media and manipulates it to inflame paranoid and racist sentiment among the white middle and underclass.”

MONTREAL – Ishmael Reed has a nice way with words, but isn’t much given to verbal niceties, like pussyfooting around the N-word. He puts it right up front, on the cover of his latest volume of bristling essays on the state of American society. Its zinger title in full is “Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers.” It’s a bit of a jolt for some sensibilities. He did a promotional appearance on a local radio station on a recent visit to Montreal and the host declined on grounds of propriety to speak the subtitle on air. But then Reed has made a career now going on half a century of jolting conventional sensibilities, from back in the mid-’60s day when he co-founded seminal “underground” paper The East Village Other. He’s 72 now and a venerable figure in American letters, but an accumulation of years, accomplishment and honours haven’t softened his punch.