"Pulled from the past, this is a brilliant exploration of black childhood with profound emotional depth, drawn from the grace and struggles of community and reinforcing the truth that no one knows Harlem like Baldwin. (Fiction. 8-adult)"
Back in print after decades, Baldwin's warmly vernacular tale celebrates and explores the challenges and joys of childhood on a 1970s-era Harlem block rippling with black life.
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"There are too many ephemeral or weakly written pieces to appeal beyond Baldwin's devoted admirers, but the best of the '60s essays underscore the reasons his work endures."
A grab bag of pieces from novelist and firebrand Baldwin (1924-1987), varying in quality but marked by his trademark ferocity.
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Perhaps only a young black writer as prickly as the early Baldwin himself should review this, though at first it seems unreviewable by a black of any age, since Baldwin begins by rejecting blackness or negritude itself as a self-defeating, even strangling self-categorization.
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"Bathos aplenty, anger folded-down too minutely, energy frittered—a book that seems to have imploded along the way."
A big new novel by James Baldwin is always of major interest, and there are scenes here of Baldwin at his earthy, lyrical best.
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"Cazac's water-colored drawings are childlike as well, which suits the viewpoint, though here some discreet adult tempering might have strengthened the package."
This is billed as "a children's story for adults, an adult story for children"; it comes through at about an eight-year-old level; and it's told from the viewpoint, and in the idiom, of a four-year-old who seems a bit older.
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"One might quarrel with such a sweeping put-down, but as it is his films are touchstones for his own experiences in fear and trembling."
This, Baldwin's unexpected consideration of movie-made America, has some of the same sad sweetness of his last novel If Beale Street Could Talk.
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"But Baldwin makes the affirmation of the humanity of black people which is all too missing in various kinds of Superfly and sub-fly novels."
This new Baldwin novel is told by a 19-year-old black girl named Tish in a New York City ghetto about how she fell in love with a young black man, Fonny.
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"Black solidarity triumphs over the kind of tough honesty that is necessary if this sort of encounter is to work."
A short and vacuous semi-revised transcription of a discussion between the young black poet and well-known novelist taped for U.S. television late in 1971.
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"Mostly one is confronted with psychological and ideological disingenuousness — and vanity as well."
James Baldwin has come a long way since the days of Notes of a Native Son, when, in 1955, he wrote: "I love America more than any other country in the world; and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."
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"Symphonic in structure, mixing religious and sexual motifs, encompassing various shades of characters and situations against the background of a boat trip up the Hudson, 'The Outing' is memorable in every sense; funny, sad, colorful, it is a triumphant performance."
With the exception of "The Man Child," a macabre, faintly Lawrentian study of repressed love between two white men in the rural South, all of Baldwin's tales here deal in one form or another with the Negro problem.
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"Symphonic in structure, mixing religious and sexual motifs, encompassing various shades of characters and situations against the background of a boat trip up the Hudson, 'The Outing' is memorable in every sense; funny, sad, colorful, it is a triumphant performance."
With the exception of "The Man Child," a macabre, faintly Lawrentian study of repressed love between two white men in the rural South, all of Baldwin's tales here deal in one form or another with the Negro problem.
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There will be firm literary as well as theatrical interest in Baldwin's new play which examines prejudice in a small Southern town responsible for the murder of a young Negro.
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"And this relentless insistence, despite a certain banality and naivete, ends by conveying a honest and despairing conviction of reality."
This novel about love, by a well-known Negro author, has received a good deal of advance publicity and will probably be widely read.
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The collected "pieces" of the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain form a compelling unit as he applies the high drama of poetry and sociology to a penetrating analysis of the Negro experience on the American and European scene.
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"Androcles and the Lion, The Story of Cincinnatus, George Washington and His Hatchet, Whittington and His Cat- these are some of the tales, the rest of which are just as familiar and just as available elsewhere."
Very brief recapitulations of some thirty retold legends spans time from prehistory to the 1700's and countries from Ancient Greece to the American colonies.
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"By all means introduce the original first but keep this satisfying alternate in mind, especially for younger children of seven — even six."
A most successful retelling of the classic for the pre-junior high group, which skirts the pitfalls of the labryinthian sentence structure of the original and yet never weakens the excitement of the story.
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