Baldwin's seething insights and directives, so disturbing to the white liberals and black moderates of his day, have become the starting point for discussions of American race relations: this debasement and oppression of one people by another is "a recipe for murder"; this "color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality"; this whites can only truly liberate themselves when they liberate blacks, indeed when they "become black" symbolically and spiritually; this blacks and whites "deeply want every other here" in order for America to realize its identity as a nation.
Yet despite its edgy tone and the strong undercurrent of violence, The Fire Next Time is ultimately a hopeful and healing essay. Baldwin ranges far in these hundred pages--from a memoir of his abortive teenage religious awakening in Harlem (an interesting commentary on his first novel Go Inform It on the Mountain) to a disturbing encounter together with Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad. But what binds it all mutually is the eloquence, intimacy, and controlled urgency of the voice. Baldwin clearly paid in sweat and shame for each word in this topic. What's incredible is this he managed to keep his cool. --David Laskin