So engaging I read it twice over the weekend/beginning of the week. He is acerbic, sometimes bitterly so, but oddly optimistic. I read the '84 ed. where he writes about the difference in age (31 when it was published and 60 when this ed came out) and was struck by what he wrote then, with more ex...
The book follows a twelve-year-old girl growing up in 1930s Black Harlem. The book offers a fascinating look into poverty in urban areas. Although set in the 1930s, I thought the book was closer to the pos-WW2 era. The time frame is not as important as the story. The heroine of the story lear...
”He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once: saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to...
James Baldwin is one of my two favorite essayists, along with George Orwell, which is kind of strange because they are very different writers. Orwell is of course known for the simple and direct style that he evangelized for, while Baldwin tends to be more baroque and elliptical (though not to e...
Tell Me How Long the Train Has Been Gone is James Baldwin’s fourth novel. Published in 1968, Baldwin’s work explores his usual themes of racism, white privilege, bisexuality, Christianity and interracial relationships. Though not as prominently recognized as Giovanni’s Room, Go Tell it On the...
Written in 1963 as "the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon", this is as relevant almost fifty years later. The sheer ugliness of American racism is now embedded in the discourses that hide it, those gentile liberal nicenesses that serve exactly the same...
As with any short story collection, some are better than others, so I'm going to give star ratings to each one. I recommend skipping the first three and just reading the final five."The Rockpile" 3 stars. I was dismayed to discover that this book contains two stories about the characters from "G...
A play inspired by the story of Emmett Till, I knew this would be a rough read but underestimated by just how much. For majority of the play, Baldwin had me convinced that the story wouldn’t play out the way Till’s story did but in the end, it shook me completely to realize just how indifferent t...
I loved this book. I'm an avid James Baldwin reader and this book is not without the piercing vulnerability and intense realism within conflict that Baldwin is so notably known for. It takes place in Manhattan in late sixties. Beneath the radical liberalness that defines the time, Baldwin populat...
MenuThe Poetry & Writings ofChristopher F. Brown“No Name in The Street” by James Baldwin: A reviewnonameinthestreet“No Name in The Street” is the title given to a work of art James Baldwin penned in 1972. This production of a master wordsmith chronicles certain events of his life up until that po...
These are a series of brilliant essays by James Baldwin which examine film, culture and race in American society. He makes enlightening thoughts and comments about people like Betty Davis, Sidney Poitier, and Joan Crawford. He shows how a major film can represent an individual like Billie Holiday...
Finally in paperback, here is James Baldwin's only collection of poems. Baldwin's language is deceptively simple--this poetry is easily understood. But the emotions behind the words go to the core not only of the poet's soul, but of America's. Readers will see Baldwin here in both a familiar and ...
I mean, tell me about that night you saw the light, when the light knocked you down. What’s the cost of being lost and found? It must be high. And I’ve always thought you must have been, stumbling homeward, trying to find your way out of town through all those baffling signals, those one-way stre...
EVERYONE HAD ALWAYS said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it...
One is compelled to understand that moment which, anyway, occurs over and over and over. Lord, sitting here now, with my boy with a toothache in the bed yonder, asleep, I hope, and me, awake, so far away, cursing the toothache, cursing myself, cursing the fence of pain. &n...
And yet, on the other hand, the State as we know it is very largely, if not entirely, the result of the actual and moral exhaustion of society, with a small s. The actual, baffling, continuing, and wounding relations which obtain among human beings cause us to long for Authority as deeply as we l...