I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

This book intricately wove the thread of connection between Malcolm, Martin, and Medgar. Most individuals rarely mention Malcolm and omit Medgar altogether. But here readers have the opportunity to experience all 3. More specifically, after reading James Baldwin's 'I am not your negro', you will see more from his perspective too. His words gently force you to admit truth, know your purpose, and serve well in the process. All four gentlemen (James, Malcolm, Martin and Medgar) possess this strength.

This book was excellent in knowing the thoughts of a writer that I have admired for years. His words ring true even in today's America. This book proves that history repeats itself.

I am reconciled to that fact, though I don't like it. The problem, as I see it, is the implementation of democracy. We are promised it, but don't have it. The majority of us, upon whom democracy depends, must fix that. The role of democracy is to protect the individual, the most important of whom is YOU!

This was my first book I gotten on James Baldwin, the book that made me want to buy more works by James Baldwin. The first book that changed my life. I love this book based on the documentary it is so expressive and detailed and the words made me feel something and that's what I love in any kind of book. James Baldwin is so timeless and classic and the fact that his words still resonate til this day says a lot. Overall, 10/10 would recommend 🙌🏽

> Acquired Book > I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, 03.06.2017, Prior To Michael GreenGold Film Acquisition By The Same Title > Definite Advantage To Have Both Book & Film Which Came Later > However, Our Best Advantage Is To Have A Working Knowledge Of Works Of James Baldwin, etc. Prior To Both!...Michael GreenGold...

He speaks a plain truth from his eyes and backs it up with pop culture examples. Every American student should get a chance to see the film or spend an hour on the guide.

Very interesting history, but is not a book by James Baldwin, rather being a collection of some of his writings intended as companion to the documentary, I Am Not Your Negro. Might have been advantageous to first having seen the documentary.

Baldwin is one of the greats, period! Being able to take a journey through his personal notes, public interviews and commentary on the state of black/white Amerika was incredible. One the back of all the black lives lost, it’s still important to ask that question - whether white amerika is willing to face the obvious racial problem in this country, and if not, what does that mean for this grand experiment

The book was okay, but it was to simplistic for the topics it discussed. I thought the book would offer in-depth, detailed discussions and that was not the case. It did provide some interesting points to consider though.

As a young Blackman growing up in Harlem in 1960, I New of Mr. Baldwins name, yet never read his works. His writings are just as important then and now for all races

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

My review would have been 5 stars, but it's really is a companion for the movie. It is with shame that I admit I wasn't familiar with him when I saw the movie, but I was blown away by it. I was under the impression this was a book written by Mr. Baldwin, and although it IS his writings, it has been good to read it and think back on the film, but I'm eager now to read his work. Mr. Baldwin's voice is one which must be heard by all. He was so incredibly eloquent and it's sad that he's no longer with us.

A must read to add to your knowledge power

This work is a true companion to the documentary. It should be read immediately after reviewing the film Excellent read.

Very poorly put together as you can see in the pics. Very disappointed by that.

Straightforward thoughts that are so hard hitting and insightful. Reall makes you think about lives you have or have not experienced simply because of the color of your skin.

I have only read Baldwin's "Go Tell it on the Mountain" which helped shaped my views about the Black church. Reading this book which was to accompany the film gave me more insight into other issues that Baldwin was passionate about in describing the Black experience. I am excited to watch the film!!

A visionary who speaks about the world and the problems it faces and creates for itself. This is a sobering book about the state of America, visionary in that though it is a collection of works written some time ago it speaks to the world as it exists today, so many years later, showing us how far we still have to go.

James Baldwin is my favorite writer. Raoul Peck did a great job putting this together and I know James Baldwin would be proud.

Our history is not the past but the present. Will we continue to be a pawn in their game? Life has taught us so many things, one of which is it is not fair.

On point, well written and documented, raw, self explanatory, expressions of real people with real everlasting problems that are still ignored. Words needed saying and printed. A truth intelligently exposed

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

This product came exactly on time and it was new. I love how all the stories are tightly woven in together. I can’t wait to see the documentary. I really enjoyed this.

I gave this four stars simply because I thought it would be a bit different from the movie. It is basically the narrative of the movie with pictures instead of motion picture.

I've shared this book and the movie with friends of many flavors. It helps as a conversation starter for mutual respect and understanding.

Very informative and interesting read basically defining and breaking down how the black man is viewed in American.. I enjoyed reading this

Baldwin was a very interesting articulate man. The movie is good, but there are fractured scenes from the lives of the three main characters that don't flow into each other. I enjoyed it but the parts of the puzzle did not fit together.

I give this book 4 stars for being able to enlighten me on James Baldwin. Having an understanding of ones insight helps in seeing their perspective. I am Not Your Negro delivers a interesting history of blacks in society where racial tensions were high. Baldwin declares his place in history within this body of work.

After viewing the documentary whose screenplay is printed in this book, I wanted to have access to some of the profound and thoughtful comments that Baldwin made in the film. I refer to it often and have ordered more of Baldwin's books. I definitely recommend you watch the documentary on DVD, since Raoul Peck's interviews expand on the message he filmed.

A book that must be read and a movie that must be seen. If you are white: Baldwin speaks to us in direct messages that we must heed and for which we are accountable. His message, his writing remains as relevant now as it did when Baldwin assembled these notes.

This book was interesting to me. It was hard to stop reading it when I began and so I read the entire book at one sitting.

To read of things that you know are to be true but from the perspective of the person being persecuted is an awakening. Read this.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

While the words and passages listed in this book are great... The lack of explanation of the context and meaning leaves this feeling like a word document that was used as a reference for a greater project, accidentally sent to the printer. Still good though.

went saw documentary at the theatre...glad I have to book as a reference now...

He’s my love and there’s nothing bad I could say about it. Check out the movie too. You’ll love it. America hates us but he was an amazing writer and amazing American.

James B. is very inspiring I think I have read all his books and have enjoyed every one of them.

Interesting reading. This took so long to get to me heard it was lost in the mail.

I have enjoyed all of James Baldwin books. There should be a statue erected to honor him as an Author and Civil Rights Leader. It's abomination that he had to flee this country in order to find freedom. How ironic is that.

Watched the Netflix documentary and enjoyed it so I know I will enjoy the reading of it!

I was expecting something else. While it was interesting, it wasn't quite what I expected. I thought he would go into detail concerning his relations with the men of thevtimes.

The headline I wrote seems negative, but it's just a reflection of my expectations. I thought there would be additional information besides what's in the movie. Instead it's pretty much the movie script. Given the unique storytelling in the movie, that's not a bad thing.

Excellent book for all. It doesn't matter who you are, you can find something valuable and applicable from this literature. Eye opening and humbling, so glad I read this. Voices like Baldwin only go silent when we turn our backs and cover our ears.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

I saw the movie trailor but decided to read the book before the movie. I've always been a Baldwin fan and the Baldwin family made a wise choice in allowing the author to tell the story in the way he thought Mr. Baldwin would have completed it. The care, research, and respect given was evident. Two thumbs up!!!

James Baldwin’s piercing insights are pieced together with clips of films and excerpts from powerful writers and visionaries along with images of fantasy in a culture that has been for too long violent and sick and needs to heal itself to save itself.

Excellent read. It's like your one of the characters in the book.

I saw the film first and was excited to see that there were actual pictures from the film. I read it every couple of weeks Overall, a great depiction of the film.

Give you inside look on his life and the people who was connected.

Greatest book!!!! Doesn't get any better than this. I watched the movie also. This is a great book to accompany the film. A masterpiece to collect!!! James Balwin was truly amazing!!!!

I saw the film, excellent! But the book allows me to pause, to think a bit more. This information is needed by many. And this presentation is clear and honest.

AS POSTED, GOOD PRICE, FAST SHIPPING, GOOD WRAPPING: RECOMMENDED.

Great companion to the film. If you want to explore the writings of James Baldwin, this is a good start. There is also a considerable amount of information that is contained here and few other places. I would recommend this to budding scholars of whiteness and race theory.

I am a James Baldwin fan. Thank you and such a good price.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

Nothing to dislike this marvelous book!

A good read and a compliment to the motion picture. Well written and well done.

This book is a great read, and a heart wrenching truth.

But it looked strange not like other books..

Great book! Great movie! Taught me so many points about Baldwin.

If I didn't already know as much as I do about James Baldwin, his writings, his speeches and so on, I'd be out looking for him now that I might join his band of justice...alas like so many others from whom the "veil has been lifted " he is no longer with us. And yet the still - existing problems he shared are searching for visionary activists who will take the same risks for a better tomorrow

I bought this right after seeing the film and it was so helpful to have as a companion to go back on reflect on particular parts of the documentary, which is a MUST SEE.

Inspirational

great

Like

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

Great book. Very quick read. The movie is on Prime Video now.

Loved this book. Baldwin will never be forgotten.

James Balwin is a awesome author I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO was interesting and a great read.

Very revealing and informative. One is literally a guest in the mind of Mr. Baldwin. It's definelty a good read.

A must read in high school and college

No comments

Reading this was like listening to James Baldwin’s voice in real time and in the times at which he actually spoke the words. There were powerful sentiments in each excerpt and moment provided to the reader. Makes you want more and inspires you to read on!

Mr. Baldwin once again articulated the pain & passion of the American negroes. It is up to the white establishment to ask of itself: wat can I do to solve the "negroes" problem?

Great book!!!

I saw the movie and when I saw the book, I knew I would buy it. Baldwin is the gift that keeps on giving. This is a must have for collectors of Baldwin's work. I highly recommend it.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

Great book

I got this as required school reading for my kid. Once I read it, it proved to definitely be worth my time and the money spent on it.

Excellent book concerning a great man with a wonderful talent

Excellent!!

A MUST READ. ALSO SEE THE FILM! IT'S AVAILABLE ON DVD.

He was my hero. He was an American genius and truth seeker. He knew and he said it all. If only America could have listened when he was here.

love it

A must read. Makes you realize what the world lost with his passing.

James Baldwin was an exceptional writer and this book published after his death is another clear and concise and to the point writing of his.

Can’t wait to read! My daughter loved it!

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

I love this book! It's great for children and adults, not only educators. This book is easy to read and understand. Thank you for a great book! The price was also affordable!

Good read. Good to add to the library.

Was very intuitive look at the world from a black man's prospective. Made me set and think of my own interactions with the black community. They deserve more respect than they are given.

Good read! The movie is the book's narration, however, read the book, see the movie, rhen read the book again!

Very well written eye opener educational. If you are a human being this is a must read.such a tragedy not to have more of Mr. Baldwin's writings

Mr. Baldwin was such a wonderful writer. I will be seeing the movie later this month and I'm so glad I was able to read the accompanying book before seeing the documentary.

Great read

Very well written. I'd recommend it to every black man / woman.

Nice book to give to a young person who saw the film. Sadly it was bent up in the box sent with other Amazon items.

Great movie great book

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

Where's a sixth star when you need one? Phenomenally curated collection of Baldwin works. You don’t get America if you don’t get this movie.

Great book amazing and delivery on expected date!!!

great read

I am now ready to purchase the DVD.

The truth is the truth

I love this book. Very insightful and interesting.

good!

A on point read for this day

Brilliant!

Thank You!!!!

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

Recommend this for history month.

Excellent read! Thought provoking, insightful, and sobering perspective of race relations in the United States. The book provides a valuable historical viewpoint.

Wonderful documentary

Excellent video about an American "his tory".

A great book from an incredible documentary.

THIS IS NOT A REVIEW FOR I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO. THIS IS A REVIEW ABOUT HOW BAD THE BOOK WAS PUT TOGETHER

This classic was timely to review now.

Excellent read, the same things Mr. Baldwin documented still exist today with more of a bold unfiltered version.

well documented for portraying the truth

A must have

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

Vintage Baldwin!

James Baldwin is a great writer

This book is an eye opener. The author is very informative. This book is very well written. A must read.

As a Baldwin fan since the early 1980's, I am hungry for more!!

Some of the facts stated in book are questionable. Perhaps it could be a mis print or I need to do a memory check review.

Outstanding companion to an equally outstanding documentary.

love this author!

This book help me to have perspective...where we were and where we’ve yet to go. Read on dear one. Know.

Great read!

This was bought as a gift. It was well recieved and enjoyed.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

Worth it

Ordered for my wife

Excellent Book!

👍🏾👍🏾

Well written novel. Looking forward to viewing the documentary This is the first piece I've ever read from Baldwin. I will definitely read more of his material

This was a book that my 81 year old mother had a desire to read. She really enjoyed the reading choice. I will be reading it next.

This is an excellent work by an important and brilliant author.

My husband wanted this book, he enjoys it very informative

A brilliantly captivating work. A must read for those who seek to understand and fight for justice.

Book arrived as promised and in excellent condition.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

The companion text is a great way to recapture Baldwin's mastery with words and bring to life the struggle for racial reconciliation that persists over 50 years later.

I enjoy reading James Baldwin's works

Thoroughly enjoyed this, another wonderful glimpse into an incredible mind and man of great passion, a unique observer of the human spirit.

Great book!

It must have been such a monumental task to take varied pieces of media and transform into something that would validate Baldwin's very essence....bravo

Always loved his books

This was the most eye opening documentary I have ever read.

Enjoyed the documentary-- then read this book. Both were interesting and current

GREAT!

This is a must see movie.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

Interesting and informative book

James Baldwin what else is there to say

Very well written, organized, and I look forward to it being shown on cable tv.

Just amazing

Wasn't what I expected

Fast Shipment, Best book I've ever read!!!!

food for thought

Great Book! Great Author!

Love it.

It's Baldwin, of course it's good.

James Baldwin wrote my review: "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “n___r” in the first place, because I’m not a n____r, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a n____r, it means you need him. The question that you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South because it’s one country and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South—it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact….If I’m not the n____r here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” We need to read this book and work on that question, not as a rhetorical question or an imponderable Zen koan but seriously and concretely. The answer might even tell us why so many of us need Donald Trump, either as our hero or our devil.

Impressionistic. Powerful. This book (and the film on which it is based) seem less intended to educate white people than to emote the perspective of one of the most perceptive and articulate 20th century voices of color. This book is not a primer for people unfamiliar with Baldwin. It's a tribute to a project that Baldwin himself didn't live to see completed. I think it works best as a companion piece to the film rather than a stand-alone book. (For instance, it includes excerpts from transcripts of movies that influenced Baldwin or that Baldwin reviewed, and these work better in their original medium.) I recommend seeing the film first, and then using the book for meditating and revisiting afterward. I'd still like to see the full manuscript of Baldwin's "Remember This House," in addition to the spliced up version used in this book. I would've liked if the book made it more clear where these particular excerpts are. It will be most successful if it points more and more readers to Baldwin's works.

What an amazing book. It is kind of the script to the movie, which I loved. Baldwin was an astonishingly intelligent and thoughtful voice in a very troubled period. We need more voices like his now.

Raoul Peck's documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro," is a brilliant, absorbing and stirring vision of James Baldwin as public civil rights advocate, crucial spokesperson for African Americans in a revolutionary time, a profound and eloquent voice that speaks as clearly to this historical moment as it did to the one that it originally addressed. This is a truly outstanding film, timeless in its relevance and also in its art, that I intend to share with my students for as many years to come as I am blessed to enjoy. In this particular historical moment, "I Am Not Your Negro" is absolutely necessary, irreplaceable, inimitable. With my friend, Craig Werner, the brilliant literary scholar, music critic, and cultural historian, I watched this film twice in two days and ruminated over it for much longer than it took to watch it. The importance of this book by the same title is that it allows us to examine the film and explore Baldwin's political voice more closely, checking to make sure we caught what was said, dwelling upon crucial moments and passages whose depth and complexity reward a more deliberate look. The film, however, is what really matters. My conversations with Werner, chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I taught for a decade, were illuminated by Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and other essays by this gifted poet and literary scholar. It is hard to separate Pavlic's thought from the sparks that flew in our conversations, but it is impossible to understand them without him, either. In order to fully appreciate the film's accomplishments, serious viewers need to remember that this public and overtly political James Baldwin that Peck holds up in the film is not the only Baldwin that lived. Pavlic makes this point by differentiating between "the public James Baldwin," whom we meet here in all his power, and "the personal Jimmy Baldwin," friend, lover, raconteur among the people of the night, and "Jamie," the son and the brother, who used this name when he signed the dozens and dozens of letters that he wrote to his beloved brother David. Peck paints the public and political Baldwin, the Baldwin of his incredible speeches, so well selected and framed in "I Am Not Your Negro," who is essentially the same voice in much of his nonfiction essays, but there are other Baldwins to explore, the James Baldwin of his novels, the Jimmy Baldwin of his personal life, and the Jamie of his familial devotion. According to Pavlic, there is also a fourth Baldwin, and I think Peck captures this one quite well, too, which is "an unnamed writer to translated himself into a kind of universal human kin." "I Am Not Your Negro," both the film and this helpful book, preserves and brings to a needy and broken world the eloquence of one of its profound geniuses, whose genius, in T.S. Eliot's definition of genius, comes from our history's most powerful expressive culture and theological vision, a poetic genius that is ever sharper the closer it stands to the heart of that tradition, a moral visionary that "left the church to preach the gospel," as Baldwin said, a universal voice grounded in love, even when it is acerbic, slashing and surgically critical, when it is redemptive gospel, when it is unflinching blues, and when it is ingenious jazz. We all owe Raoul Peck an enormous debt of gratitude, and I feel that very deeply.

Wow- this collection and view of James Baldwin is a penetrating and powerful economy of words that does Baldwin's work justice. Of course I saw the film first and the author and filmmaker has done us and the Legacy of Baldwin a great service. Every word, view and concept that Baldwin ever uttered has become more true and more relevant with every passing year. We are in major trouble here in the US for all the reasons he predicted. What is so profound about Baldwin is what he understood so clearly about the pathos driving white western culture. Unless dismantled, this pathos makes it necessary to have an "other", a human being or group to blame and exploit. Fear and hate sustains this illness and continues to place us at risk for a sad decline all over the USA and Europe. My deepest hope is that we can continue to evolve toward peace and equality without the same degree of hatred, death and destruction that occurred through much of the 20th century. There's no way this evolution will be pretty but I hope we can make it possible to leave less destruction in its path than our ancestors did. In this regard, this book is a scary and sad, but affirming opportunity to help us wake up and have the courage it will take to dismantle white privilege. It continues to kill all of us and right now one of the most afflicted victims of this illness sits in the white house, which for the time being is most certainly not the people's house.

Paying Dues James Baldwin died in December, 1984; since that time his pen has been silent, but in documentarian Raoul Paul’s 2016 academy award nominated documentary film I’m Not Your Negro Baldwin speaks to us from the beyond. Here, not only does Baldwin explain the intricacies of the racial dynamics of his time, but Paul by putting together a synthesis of Baldwin filmed speeches, television appearances, notes, book excerpts, comments by Baldwin friend’s and given complete access to the Baldwin Estate by executor Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, he allows Baldwin to instructs us on current racial circumstances as well. Then there is so much Baldwinnese that is ageless that they apply to then and now. Raoul Paul had all of this to weave together, when Gloria, oldest of Baldwin’s two younger sisters give him a thirty page uncompleted manuscript Baldwin started before he flew away. The manuscript’s working title was of “Notes Toward Remember This House,” a book about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin meet and worked with all three of these murdered African American leaders once he returned to America from France to “Pay my dues.” Baldwin, who moved to France early in his writing career to avoid American racism and to experience life as a man unhindered by pettiness of American racism, monitored dispatches of the situation back home. Because he missed none of the American amenities he had no desire to return to it. He only missed his family and the Harlem Sunday mornings, fried chicken and biscuits, the music and “that style possessed by no other people in the world.” After seeing in a Paris newpapper the anguish on the face of a young black school girl being reviled and spat on by an angry white mob as she made it to her newly integrated Charlotte, North Carolina school, he became furious and filled with hatred and pity and shame. “Someone of us should have been with her,” he later writes. It was then that he knew that he was leaving France for home and the battle. He surmised that everyone else was paying their dues; it was time he came home and paid his. So Baldwin returned to the United States of America and immediately involved himself in the struggle to liberate black souls. James Baldwin was aware from childhood that no one resembling his father has ever appeared in American cinema and that it was from American cinema that America, and therefore the people of America, got a sense of itself. Movies were a reflection of the lives we all live. As Baldwin did in his literature, I’m Not Your Negro lays out the case against racism and bigotry in a methodical manner that gives one the sense of the futility of the whole enterprise in the long run. Whites have gain much from their devised system of discrimination in the interim, but it has been pointed out in ways spread widely enough for all of to know that none of us is free until we are all totally free. Baldwin describe his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle as a “Witness” and uses an episode with Medgar Evers, then Chairmen of the Mississippi Chapter of the NAACP, to explain what he meant by witness. Evers was once asked to investigate the murder of a black man that happened several months earlier. He showed the letter to Baldwin and asked him to accompany him on the investigative field trip. This is when Baldwin discovered the line that separates a witness from a principal player on the stage of events. Baldwin knew that he was not responsible for any of decisions that governed the success or failure of the Movement, his responsibility, as a witness, was to get around as freely as possible, to write the story, and get it out there. In doing what he saw as his dues paying duty, Baldwin managed to grab the attention of the FBI who monitored him closely enough to develop a file that concluded that Baldwin was a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety to the United states in times of emergency and James Baldwin’s name was included in the security index. Baldwin saw himself as a witness, but the FBI saw him as a prime player in the struggle for black liberation. James Baldwin fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders to end segregation in public places and he lived to see that come about. I’m Not Your Negro affords us an opportunity to weight Baldwin’s judgement on America’s race problem on current situations. Not what Baldwin would say about Ferguson or Baltimore, rather, what has Baldwin said about these events even before they happened? Baldwin declaration that their not knowing what’s happening to the Negro is not only the result of their apathy, but is also because they simply don’t want to know and that this makes them moral monsters. You’ll find other incidents where Baldwin’s words prove appropriate to applied to today’s facts in the documentary and students of the Black Lives Matter Movement will have a field day deciphering and pairing Baldwin’s words to today’s on the ground racial facts. Through I’m Not Your Negro, James Baldwin lives.

Even though I bought this book first, I watched the movie before reading the book. It honestly wouldn't have mattered either way because the book is literally the movie in book form, following the script to the letter. In this way, I feel like the movie is more effective, but the content is still what's important. To distinguish it further, the book has a few introductory chapters that give background on how Raoul Peck came to this material and made the film. If you've already seen the film, this book isn't necessary, per se, but it's still worth looking at.

This is an example of an African American Man using his unrivaled intelligence to Fight for all people of African Decent's right to not only exist in the USA, but to thrive as equals to any other race of people! I was moved to purchase and read this book because the film was only shown on one screen for two weeks, at 8 pm and 11 pm only in the Most Culturally Diverse City in The United States of America. I downloaded the book on my kindle and read it in two evenings. Uncommon Bravery is displayed by Mr. James Baldwin in spite of the risk to his life. Through this extremely well done book his memory will live on in the hearts and minds of modern freedom fighters throughout the World! The "Black Lives Matter," movement is a cry for help in my opinion and not dissimilar to Mr. Balwin's poignant message from the grave!

This is NOT a review about the book. I admire and respect James Baldwin so much, which makes this item even more infuriating - do NOT purchase from this seller! The book feels like someone just print it out with a home printer, and trimmed the edges carelessly with a scissor. It’s all ragged! And the formatting inside seems like someone downloaded an internet copy without properly formatting it into a book.

The real violence is the internal distortion taught to us through long lost cultural norms. As a white guy, I had no idea what it was like to be black in this country. Now I have a better idea, although I can never really know. The documentary is really eye-opening and this book lets you drink in the words and clarify their meaning. We, that is human beings, need to examine what we take for granted. We have all been violated by delusions built long ago to justify exploitation and death. If the sins of a generation are indeed seven fold, then we must begin to heal this sin very soon. This book is a great way to start.

Great Documentary Book...James Baldwin was way before his time . This is not a white or black problem but a global problem.

Very orofound and eloquent piece of literature

Nice, easy read.

Great book!

Enjoyed this immensely.