Mormegil reviewed Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
Baldwin's Blues
5 stars
Reading James Baldwin is like listening to the blues, and yet more. He is able to take the pain of his subject (which is frequently himself) and make you laugh and cry at the same time. Beautiful prose, sharp satire, unflinching honesty, dry wit, long suffering compassion.
"One had, in short, to come into contact with an alien culture in order to understand that culture was not a community basket weaving project, nor yet an act of God; was something neither desireable nor undesireable in itself, being inevitable, being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they have been forced to deal. And their great men are revealed as simply another of these vicissitudes, even if, quite against their will, the brief battle of their great men with them has left them richer."
- From Equal in Paris.
