Review
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“…anyone interested in engaging in candid albeit stakes-changing
debate, anyone who had an investment in equity, humanity, and
it’s future…gained tremendously from the variegated prism through
which [Baldwin] viewed and translated the world. . . . These
pieces, previously uncollected, not only give us a sense of the
physical distances he traveled to ‘bear witness’ but also the
intellectual latitude he stretched.” —Los Angeles Times
“Baldwin on race is Baldwin on the white American psyche. . . .
The Cross of Redemption becomes an absorbing portrait of
Baldwin’s time—and of him.” —New York Review of Books
“At a time when serious people cl we live in a ‘post-racial’
society, the reappearance of Baldwin’s writing—insistent,
accusatory, outraged—feels like a terrible family secret coming
to light in an Ibsen play, or Banquo’s ghost showing up to spoil
the party. . . . It’s not easy to do what Baldwin did—not even
for Baldwin. In fact, this volume unwittingly shows just how
brutal the struggle could be.” —Newsweek
“…This book, which includes early fiction sketches that grew into
Go Tell It On The ain and Giovanni’s Room was vibrant to the
last, and his final products were a fitting, natural end to the
long trajectory of his joyful misanthropy. . . . Baldwin’s essays
are among the best in English since Orwell’s, and are freighted
with the same weary skepticism, the same register of encomium and
warning.” —Bookslut
“The Cross of Redemption as to an album of ‘studio tapes’ on
which we hear songs we know in ways we’ve never heard before.”
—Quarterly Conversation
“The concept of racial identity as a conscious choice had never
occurred to me before I encountered it in Baldwin’s work. . . .
Baldwin exposes the seamlessness of America’s racial past,
present, and future.” —Timothy Ledwith, Open Letters Monthly
“These assorted essays, letters, reviews and profiles act as a
reminder of the great power language has when used in the service
of a talent like Baldwin’s. . . . Kenan has done us all a great
service.” —Austinist
“This momentous collection of essays, book reviews, speeches,
letters and journalism—and one short story—is a fierce and
felicitous reminder of how towering a literary figure James
Baldwin was.”—Outlook Columbus
“There are many gems here: Baldwin’s impassioned essays on music,
his talks on anti-Semitism, and article about a boxing match. . .
. These days, it can be difficult to find something as lasting as
a Baldwin essay—as the kind of writing that gets under the skin
and makes it itch.”—The Harvard Crimson
“Read this book to gain in into James Baldwin, the World,
and more importantly; Yourself!” —WAGTi Radio
“These previously published writings, gleaned for the most part
from a variety of periodical sources, have a more powerful
resonance when read together in book form. A useful addition for
African American scholars.”—Library Journal
“…Offers a searing introduction to readers unfamiliar with his
work and a welcome reminder to his fans of his sorcery with the
English language. . . . Even at his most acerbic and skeptical,
Baldwin clings to the ideas of hope and reconciliation in
America.” —The Seattle Times
“The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, James Baldwin’s
passionate hope for a better America, a United States that he can
believe in and that believes in a brilliant black person, comes
through in each piece of this disparate collection.” —South
Florida Times
“…Brings the lights of day to many excellent pieces excluded from
the Library of America’s ‘Collected Essays of James Baldwin’. . .
. essential.” —SF Gate
“…While Baldwin was committed to pulling back the curtain on the
forces he felt were manipulating America’s problems, he was also
very serious about closing the gap between those in power and the
disenfranchised. This new collection shows that he was willing to
take on black, white, rich, or poor to see that happen.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“The rtunity to further bask in Baldwin’s readably precise
prose is a welcome gift. . . The Cross of Redemption shows why
Baldwin should never be allowed to go out of fashion.” —Austin
Chronicle
“Baldwin is biting and inful in his critique of religious
fundamentalism, the prospects of a black president, the hypocrisy
of the American art and cultural scene, the challenges of black
nationalism, and the complexities of race and identity. In the
long passages of his essays and the short, acerbic comments in
his interviews, Baldwin shows a masterful sweep of language and
ideas and feelings that continues to resonate.” —Booklist
“Kenan’s introduction and headnotes are models of critical good
sense; his awareness of both ‘Baldwin’s achievements that beggar
the imagination’ and of the ‘grab bag’ quality of some pieces
makes him the perfect shepherd for those ‘lost’
works.”—Publisher’s Weekly
“What you find here is a book that superbly reopens an unfinished
life. In an age that people cl is ‘post-racial,’ the
Baldwin’s-eye-view still seems to answer more questions than most
other living writers. . . .[an] invaluable book of uncollected
writings.”—Buffalo News
“His writing was diamond: sparkles, flashes and hard. The
beginning of the collection, Baldwin states the purpose of his
writing was to tell the truth. He succeeds. The Cross of
Redemption is a remarkable collection.”—aalbc.com
“Baldwin’s Cross burns with rage, smoothly, like a cocktail mixed
perfectly, Manhattan or Molotov.”—studio-walton muyumba
In Praise of James Baldwin
“Baldwin’s gift to our literary tradition is that rarest of
treasures, a rhetoric of fiction and the essay that is, at once,
Henry Jamesian and King Jamesian.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
“Baldwin’s way of seeing, his clarity, precision, and eloquence
are unique . . . He manages to be concrete, particular . . . yet
also transcendent, arching above the immediacy of an occasion or
crisis. He speaks as great black gospel music speaks, through
metaphor, parable, rhythm.”
—John Edgar Wideman
“Moralistic fervor, a high literary seriousness, the authority
of the survivor, of the witness—these qualities made Baldwin
unique.”
—The New York Review of Books
“The best essayist in this country—a man whose power has always
been in his reasoned, biting sarcasm; his insistence on removing
layer by layer the hardened skin with which Americans shield
themselves from their country.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“He has not himself lost access to the sources of his
being—which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider
range of people than any other major American writer.”
—The Nation
“[Baldwin is] among the most penetrating and perceptive of
American thinkers.”
—The New Republic
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About the Author
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James Baldwin was born in 1924 and died in 1987. Among his more
than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction are Giovanni’s Room,
Go Tell It on the ain, Notes of a Native Son, and The Fire
Next Time.
Randall Kenan is the author of, among other books, the novel A
Visitation of Spirits and the short story collection Let the Dead
Bury Their Dead. He teaches creative writing at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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