IBARW: Just Above My Head, James Baldwin
Apparently this is going to be more of a pimping week. I am okay with this. This is mostly rec and only slightly review, because I love James Baldwin so damn much.
Really, you could read anything by James Baldwin and come out on the good side. But I'm going to review and recommend one of the first books of his I read, Just Above My Head.
Baldwin is perhaps the closest thing Americans have to Jorge Luis Borges in that his essays and fiction were equally strong, engaging, and challenging in the best way. Unlike Borges, who used opacity and confusion as some of his favorite tools, Baldwin writes with a scalpel-sharp clarity. His words are carefully chosen and they have deep beauty. A gay black man who grew up in church communities in New York City and spent most of his life as an expatriate in France, Baldwin wrote passionately and directly about the civil rights movement, politics, and the reality of his life; his fiction and essays cut right to the bone.
Just Above My Head is not his best book, but it's one of my favorite Baldwin books, written mostly from the perspective of Hall Montana, a quiet, married man coming to terms with the life and death of his brother, brilliant musician Arthur. It's a big book, and it covers a lot of territory; love (gay, straight, familial), death, life, pain, race. While it is clearly and solidly rooted in its time, it's beautifully timeless too, and many of the tensions Baldwin illuminates have not even as much as faded in the past thirty years.
Random House has a bio and excerpts from Baldwin's work.
American Masters page for James Baldwin.
A portrait of Baldwin by African-American painter Beauford Delaney, Baldwin's mentor and friend.
Hilton Als has the best appreciation of Michael Jackson I've read, with a nice and dead-on quote from Baldwin, showing the man's insight held right up until his final years (Baldwin died of stomach cancer in the late 1980s).
Really, you could read anything by James Baldwin and come out on the good side. But I'm going to review and recommend one of the first books of his I read, Just Above My Head.
Baldwin is perhaps the closest thing Americans have to Jorge Luis Borges in that his essays and fiction were equally strong, engaging, and challenging in the best way. Unlike Borges, who used opacity and confusion as some of his favorite tools, Baldwin writes with a scalpel-sharp clarity. His words are carefully chosen and they have deep beauty. A gay black man who grew up in church communities in New York City and spent most of his life as an expatriate in France, Baldwin wrote passionately and directly about the civil rights movement, politics, and the reality of his life; his fiction and essays cut right to the bone.
Just Above My Head is not his best book, but it's one of my favorite Baldwin books, written mostly from the perspective of Hall Montana, a quiet, married man coming to terms with the life and death of his brother, brilliant musician Arthur. It's a big book, and it covers a lot of territory; love (gay, straight, familial), death, life, pain, race. While it is clearly and solidly rooted in its time, it's beautifully timeless too, and many of the tensions Baldwin illuminates have not even as much as faded in the past thirty years.
Random House has a bio and excerpts from Baldwin's work.
American Masters page for James Baldwin.
A portrait of Baldwin by African-American painter Beauford Delaney, Baldwin's mentor and friend.
Hilton Als has the best appreciation of Michael Jackson I've read, with a nice and dead-on quote from Baldwin, showing the man's insight held right up until his final years (Baldwin died of stomach cancer in the late 1980s).