Description

By (author) Baldwin, James; By (author) Baldwin, James

Short /annotation
Sounds a clarion warning to the world.

”A seminal meditation on race by one of our greatest writers” Barack Obama

”We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation”

JamesBaldwin”s impassioned plea to ”end the racial nightmare” in America wasa bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and givingvoice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of twointensely personal ”letters”, The Fire Next Time is at once apowerful evocation of Baldwin”s early life in Harlem and an excoriatingcondemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice.

”Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle … all presented in searing, brilliant prose” The New York Times Book Review

”Baldwinwrites with great passion … it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of NewYork and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy” Sunday Times

”The great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement … his seminal work” Guardian

Review quote
Riveting . . . part of Baldwin”s enduring power is that he was not a political thinker. He was interested in the soul”s dark spaces much more than in the body politic.

Review quote
The great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement … his seminal work

Review quote
Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle . . . all presented in searing, brilliant prose

Review quote
Baldwin writes with great passion … it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy

Review quote
A true prophet . . . his thought and its utterance are nothing less than majestical

Biographical note
Born in Harlem in 1924, James Baldwin was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, social critic, and the author of more than twenty books. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collection The Fire Next Time was a bestseller that made him an influential figure in the civil rights movement. Baldwin spent many years in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in 1987.