Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

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

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Leo Proudhammer is a lot of things at the beginning of this novel. He’s 39, he’s a famous stage actor, he’s world-traveled, he’s a Black man who grew up in Harlem, and he’s bisexual. He’s also just had a stress induced heart-attack that’s nearly killed him. In his post-attack state, he begins to reflect on his life to this point. He begins by telling about his childhood, where he and his seven-years-older brother looked out for each from their tyrant of a father. There’s the […]

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no water but the fire next time.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

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I’d been looking forward to reading this since I (finally) started reading Baldwin last year. When this became available at the library at the start of Black History Month it seemed serendipitous. That, unfortunately, is where the joy and happy coincidences ended. I’ve wanted to read this since I read Between the World and Me a few years ago. The Fire Next Time served as inspiration to Coates, at least in the format of crafting a letter to a child, Baldwin’s nephew and Coates’ son. […]

No Name in the Street – James Baldwin (1971)

No Name in the Street by James Baldwin

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In reading the two previous essay collections by Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name and Notes of a Native Son, you can feel where Baldwin’s thinking shifts throughout at times from an inner understanding of his own place in society toward a more clear understanding of his role as a writer. After those two books, you get The Fire Next Time, which clearly reads like a full reckoning. This essay collection feels like the fully articulated thoughts of someone so much more secure in his understanding, […]

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 […]



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