Tai's QuickViews: Five Stars 2010-07-15

Reviewer: Taiwo Odunsi

I admire this book. Here are some quotes from this striking work:

If the concept of God has any validity or any use it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him.

it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

theology and religion are used to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations

people tend to band behind something that takes away personal responsibility.

to accept one's past, one's history, is not the same thing as drowning in it. it is learning how to use it. an invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

if one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring.

That's Right- Not Water, Fire Next Time 2010-05-14

Reviewer: Alfred Johnson

Now I have been, as is my wont when I get "hooked" on some writer, on something of a James Baldwin tear of late, reading or re-reading everything I can get my hands on. At the time of this review I have already looked at "Go Tell It On The Mountain", "Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone", and "If Beale Street Could Talk." Frankly those works, while well written and powerful, did not altogether remind me why I was crazy to read everything that Baldwin wrote when I was a kid. The Baldwin black liberation manifesto (and, maybe, white liberation as a by-product), "The Fire Next Time", "spoke" to me then and after forty years still "speaks" to me now in so-called "post-racial" Obama time.

Back in the early 1960s I used to listen to a late night talk show on the local radio station in Boston. Many times the host would have Malcolm X on and the airwaves would light up with his take on white racism, black nationalism and the way forward for the black liberation struggle- and away from liberal integrationism. Now in those days I was nothing but a woolly-headed white, left liberal "wannabe" bourgeois politico kid who believed in black liberation but in the context of working within the prevailing American society. I was definitely, and adamantly, opposed to the notion of a separate black state on the American continent if for no other reason that it would look something like the then existing ghettos, writ large, that I was committed to getting rid of and a set up for black genocide if things got too hot. And I still am. So, on the one hand, I admired, and I really did, Malcolm X for "speaking truth to power" on the race question while on the other disagreeing with virtually every way he wanted to achieve it.

Now that scenario is the predicate for James Baldwin's assuredly more literary, but seemingly more hopeful, way of getting the thread of the Malcolm X message about white racism out while posing the possibility (or, maybe, necessity) of joint struggle to get rid of it. In my recent re-reading of "The Fire Next Time" I was struck by how much of Baldwin's own hard-fought understandings on the question of race intersected with The Nation Of Islam, Malcolm at the time, and Elijah Mohammad's. Oddly, I distinctly remember debating someone, somewhere on the question of black nationalism and using Baldwin's more rational approach as a hammer against the black nationalists. I probably overdrew his more balanced view of a multiracial American then, if not now.

Still, Jimmy was onto something back then. Something that airy-headed kids like me, who thought that once the struggle in the South was won then the struggle in the North could be dealt with merely by a little fine-tuning, were clueless about. Don't smirk. But do note this: while only a fool or political charlatan, would deny that there have been gains for the black population since those civil rights struggle days the pathology of racism and, more importantly, the hard statistics of racism (housing segregation, numbers in the penal system, unemployment and underemployment rates, education, and a whole range of other factors) tell a very different story about how far blacks really have come over the last half century. A story that makes "The Fire Next Time" read like it could have been written today. And to be read today. Thanks, Jimmy.

Fantastic Thesis 2010-04-29

Reviewer: A. Darby

James Baldwin is a fantastic writer. I completely agree with his all of his main points and believe that they still apply today. His description of his meeting with Elijah Muhammad was the highlight.

Good buy 2010-02-02

Reviewer: Bridget N. Havard

Although baldwin has had heaps of negative feedback for his writing-I enjoyed the book. It depicts the civil rights probably less malicously about whites than most books which is why he was critized but it was a good read.

The Fire Next Time 2009-03-10

Reviewer: Dennis T. Pressey

This is a brilliantly written, powerful, honest, and insightful book.
It touches on some very sensitive topics in America, that many do not wish to discuss. Mainly, racism and historical facts and myths. Mr. James Baldwin was a genius, and anyone who reads this book will learn profound truths, and subsequently not be the same!