James Baldwin is one of my favorite authors. He put passion and pain on the page like no other. So I’m choosing “The Cross of Redemption-Uncollected Writings” as this Sunday’s Book to Binge on. Getting inside the mind of a literary legend like Baldwin will fill any Sunday afternoon with delight. Enjoy and share the knowledge…

Excerpted from the New York Times: 

Within a year or two, Baldwin himself had accepted a new job. Having attained prominence over the course of the 1950s as a novelist, with “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “Giovanni’s Room,” and as a reporter issuing passionately perceptive dispatches from Paris, Harlem and the disintegrating South, Baldwin found himself increasingly in demand as a speaker on behalf of the civil rights movement. After publication of “The Fire Next Time” in 1963, he became a celebrity presence at events — a “face.” At the end of the decade, however, demoralized by the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, he suffered a form of nervous collapse and retreated to the French hilltop village of St.-Paul-de-Vence, near Nice, where he lived in subdued peace and where he died in 1987. “Since Martin’s death . . . something has altered in me,” he wrote in his account of the tumultuous period, “No Name in the Street.” “Something has gone away.” While the “something” came back to Baldwin the man, mightily impressive and entertaining in private, as electrifying a public speaker as any who ever stepped onto a platform, it revisited the writer only in patches. The habit of sermonizing, once established, was hard to break.

Read the complete book review here: via www.nytimes.com

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