Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About Those Kids

The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin

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When writing about James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates said that Baldwin had the ability to talk through you. What I took that to mean is that Baldwin’s words were such a focused fury, combining intellect and rhetoric that it connected with the reader in a deeper way than most. I felt that somewhat in The Fire Next Time, but I especially feel it in this one, which is almost more personal. Baldwin doesn’t let his foot off the gas for this book-length essay. Drawing on American history, […]

Filling in My Gaps

Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington

Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

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I made it a point earlier this year to try to be better. One of the things I told myself that I would do is read more books by black authors, especially those that I should have already read. I was assigned Should of Black Folk in college. I probably still have my copy on a bookshelf in my house but I doubt that I read it for class. Maybe enough to get by in case I was called on but I didn’t really read […]

That Invisible Frontier

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin

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Leo Proudhammer, a 39-year-old, black, successful actor, suffers a heart attack on stage. This prompts him to look back on the events and people that shaped him, from growing up poor in Harlem to trying to make it big in the theatre as a young man, and from his turbulent relationship with his older brother Caleb and his long lasting liaison with the white actress Barbara to his affair with the young revolutionary Christopher. The way James Baldwin dissects race relations in America may be […]

“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

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If we- and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world It is time to listen. James Baldwin had a voice unlike any other. He transcends country, creed, and time. His work is astonishing and terribly important. The […]

Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile.

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

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A great collection of short stories by James Baldwin. Generally (if not all of) these stories are near perfect, and a good reminder of how much I really like listening to short story collections on audiobook. The opening story “The Rockpile” is one of those perfect stories (I think “Sonny’s Blues” and “Going to Meet the Man” are the obvious others), begins us with a boy watching his step-brother defy all order to stay in the house and goes to the neighborhood rockpile where there’s […]



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