The Fire Next Time

by James Baldwin

The landmark work on race in America from James Baldwin, whose life and words are immortalized in the Oscar-nominated film I Am Not Your Negro

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

James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation 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

'Baldwin writes with great passion ... it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy' Sunday Times

'The great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement ... his seminal work' Guardian

• ISBN10: 1605149586
• ISBN13: 9781605149585
• Publish Date: 1 June 2008 (first published 25 January 1990)
• Publish Status: Cancelled
• Imprint: Findaway World
• Duration: 2 hours and 15 minutes
• Language: English

Reviews

[Kevin Costain]

The Fire Next Time - by James Baldwin

I loved this book.

There is no pulling of punches in Baldwin’s prose: “You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.”

How does he say to handle his countrymen? “You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

Baldwin’s writing is, as ever, beautiful and moving here. He brings you into his Harlem and Doesn’t let you stay clean. The truths here are just as prescient now as they were then.

“To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”

What’s so profound is that much of this could be written today. So much of Baldwin’s struggles still exist in many of the same ways. His descriptions of political events and how these ideas come together help one understand things of their time. Things we look back on as isolated events now were not as isolated then. As the years pass, it’s these reference points I think we all lose when struggles arise.

“I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.”