Radio Golf | 
 enlarge | Author: August Wilson
Creator: Suzan-lori Parks
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 56992
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 120
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.5
ISBN: 1559363088
Dewey Decimal Number: 812.54
EAN: 9781559363082
ASIN: 1559363088
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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Product Description
"The concluding work in one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken . . . a play that could well be Mr. Wilson's most provocative."-Ben Brantley, The New York Times "Radio Golf is a rich, carefully wrought human tapestry that is colorful, playful, thoughtful and compelling."-Ed Kaufman, The Hollywood Reporter Radio Golf is August Wilson's final play. Set in 1990 Pittsburgh, it is the conclusion of his Century Cycle-Wilson's ten-play chronicle of the African American experience throughout the twentieth century-and is the last play he completed before his death. With Radio Golf Wilson's lifework comes full circle as Aunt Ester's onetime home at 1839 Wylie Avenue (the setting of the cycle's first play) is slated for demolition to make way for a slick new real estate venture aimed to boost both the depressed Hill District and Harmond Wilks' chance of becoming the city's first black mayor. A play in which history, memory, and legacy challenge notions of progress and country club ideals, Radio Golf has been produced throughout the country and will come to Broadway this season. August Wilson's plays include Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Running, Jitney, King Hedley II, and Radio Golf. They have been produced at theaters across the country, on Broadway, and throughout the world.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Hold Me to It May 21, 2008
Radio Golf concludes August Wilson's 20th Century decade play cycle with a tale of a business man whose ambitions for progress and success ultimately come face to face with his past and his identity.
Harmond Wilks was a child of privilege, growing up under the shadow of his successful father and his business in Pittsburgh. Now he is an ambitious mayoral candidate and head of a Hill District redevelopment organization planning to build an apartment and shopping complex featuring all the usual mall suspects; Barnes & Noble, Whole Foods, Starbucks, etc. With him is Roosevelt Hicks, an old friend and business partner, equally ambitious and unabashed in his drive to succeed, he is contemptuous of blacks stuck in poverty/anger/victim hood, and willing to get in bed with suspect real estate tycoons looking to take advantage of the government's minority ownership incentives.
Their plan is set to go, but for a rundown house at 1839 Wylie. The house at 1839 Wylie proves, through the personality and character of Old Joe Barlow to be a personal boom but professional bust for Harmond and his wife, Mame.
Radio Golf is a pretty quick read, and with five characters Wilson gets to the point quickly and with a subtle flavor, found mostly in Barlow and Roosevelt-both relative extremes in the 1990's Black American experience, with Harmond in the middle-and presents a question as to what progress really is. Full of the symbols and swift language of his other works, Radio Golf does focus for the first time on the middle class Black community and the according issues. Ambition or community, revitalization of desperate neighborhoods, the value of money versus community as well as the meanings of history within the interests of American Big Business.
Not as epic or traumatic as King Hedley II or Fences or The Piano Lesson, but ever timely, spot on and important.
 Radio Golf Presents an Ugly Truth February 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My students and I read Radio Golf in preparation for a video conferences in which professional actors were rehearsing a scene from the play for a show. The main character, Harmond Wilks, dreams of becoming the first black mayor of Pittsburgh, and it looks as if he has a good chance of doing so, but when he is confronted with evidence of an injustice that he can't ignore, and tries to right it, he stands to lose it all. A true, heroic figure, he soon realizes the ugly truth that "what is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right."
Radio Gulf by August Wilson December 25, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is a proper finale to Wilson's century cycle, I read this play and the nine others as part of a college class and it wraps up the saga with Wilson's usual brand of honesty that makes his work so compelling. It speaks with sharp tongue about the ills of the black community but it all has the cathartic ring of truth. It is a bit slow to start but is an engaging story of redemption that is as funny as it is thought provoking.
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