Overall Performance: Narration Rating: Story Rating:.There were a few times where he would recite lines about his poetry but the majority of the book was about his travels to different lands, and his very interesting take on the Jim Crow south. While still a good read, this book was more about Langston Hughes the person not his poetry. I was unfamiliar with his poetry and wanted a book that would teach me more about it, this was not that book. 'I bought this book simply because the author was Langston Hughes. Cover photograph by Roy DeCarava © Sherry Turner DeCarava. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around the often strange and always exciting world he loves.

He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. A book concerned with the individual, with social issues and with art as it is a part of these things will bring its rewards as a documentary and an important diary.In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His acquaintances too-Arthur Koestler, Cartier Bresson, Covarrubias- become new people. Hughes has the knack of living in and being a part of wherever he is. His further and very extended trips through Russia and the east on a journey that took him around the world as far more than a traveler, carry the same interest. At home in the early Thirties Mary McLeod Bethune helped him start on a reading tour through Negro colleges and these trips are sharply indicative of what segregation means. Though he found prejudice there too he was freer by far than in his own home and leads us to enjoy with him the artists he met and the feelings of a people whom he describes through their music and the good times they have. On an early trip to Cuba, Hughes looked to a lifting of the color bar. All of it illustrates character and principle inductively, by colorfully descriptive and conversational narratives.

The period of which Hughes writes is in the thirties and encompasses the years from the start of the depression to the time when he was a correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. It is an amusing and often deeply serious account of the interchange between himself and people and countries- personal and international adventures that have filled his life as a true man of the world. An autobiographical travelogue from the Negro poet and writer should come as a revealing gift to those who have known his other work.

I Wonder as I Wander by Langston Hughes