
The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin
Two letters. One hundred years after emancipation. Still waiting.
For you if
you want to understand race in America through someone who loved the country too much to let it off the hook
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Two essays. The first is a letter to his fourteen-year-old nephew on the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The second is a meditation on race, religion, and what America must do to survive itself. Baldwin published this in 1963 and nothing has superseded it. He writes with a fury so controlled it reads as love — for Black people, for America, for the possibility that the country might yet become what it claims to be. The most important American political essay ever written.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Voice
- Written by a North America author
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.


