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Reviews
Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Today by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
jenna_cross's review against another edition
4.0
Oh boy, this was heavy. Glaude Jr. doesn’t spare any punches when it comes to white privilege and taking advantage of the systemic “leg ups” one receives whether you are aware of it or not. Much of this was very hard to read but essential to move in the direction of real change. Baldwin is someone I have admired for a long time and I enjoyed learning more about his life and him as a man, even though much of it saddened me. I will continue my education through reading his books and am happy to have some background of where he was on his activist/artistic journey when he wrote them.
k_aisling's review against another edition
1.0
There is nothing in Glaude's analysis that adds anything of substance to a reading of Baldwin that was not already present, in stronger form, in the original works. You do not need a Princeton professor to tell you that Baldwin's work is still relevant to our current political moment. It is evident in the work already. Glaude also repeatedly invokes the failures of electoralism and yet offers no real alternatives, landing on a weak conclusion that frames the future of liberation as lying in acts of personal catharsis entirely divorced from political action.
Just read Baldwin.
Just read Baldwin.
guinness74's review against another edition
5.0
If ever there were a book that needed to be read by an entire nation, this is the book and it's specifically for this nation.
We are once again at a crossroads and we have the opportunity to forge ahead in a new direction, or U-turn into safety or, worse, retreat into a replay of a sinister history based on the lie of white supremacy. Glaude makes the argument, based on parallels from the works of James Baldwin, that we must recreate America in order to move beyond the inequities that have plagued this country's existence since the founding. We simply cannot sit back and allow the status quo, or a safe incremental version of 'progress,' to dictate the direction of this nation. Glaude notes that it will not be easy or pain-free, but that it is ultimately necessary if we intend to honor the promise of 'all [men] are created equal.'
Obviously, if you're a fan of Baldwin, this is a must read. Obviously, if you believe that America has not made good on its promises, this is a must read. While not a guidebook, it certainly does offer many suggestions for altering these 'after times' and becoming the America that we have always expected, but never received.
We are once again at a crossroads and we have the opportunity to forge ahead in a new direction, or U-turn into safety or, worse, retreat into a replay of a sinister history based on the lie of white supremacy. Glaude makes the argument, based on parallels from the works of James Baldwin, that we must recreate America in order to move beyond the inequities that have plagued this country's existence since the founding. We simply cannot sit back and allow the status quo, or a safe incremental version of 'progress,' to dictate the direction of this nation. Glaude notes that it will not be easy or pain-free, but that it is ultimately necessary if we intend to honor the promise of 'all [men] are created equal.'
Obviously, if you're a fan of Baldwin, this is a must read. Obviously, if you believe that America has not made good on its promises, this is a must read. While not a guidebook, it certainly does offer many suggestions for altering these 'after times' and becoming the America that we have always expected, but never received.
bookly_reads's review against another edition
2.0
Sassy review incoming.
Begin Again doesn’t deserve to be about James Baldwin. What a book with such a premise ought to offer: deep insight into Baldwin’s life, deep readings of Baldwin’s work, more than a passing acknowledgment of Baldwin’s queerness, a deep analysis of current events supported by an original, well-defended thesis.
What this book actually is: a very basic biography of Baldwin that highlights his most well-known quotes and occasionally mentions Trump with the same depth as an NPR news article. Anyone who’s read the most famous works of James Baldwin and knows basic stuff about the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement, and Black Lives Matter can walk about from this book having learned literally nothing.
If the statement "Trump's politics were descended from Reagan's" sounds surprising to you, then this book might be very informative. But to me the whole point of writing a book about Baldwin is to speak to people who already know these things. I spent all of 2020 thinking about what James Baldwin would have to say if he were alive today. This book somehow went less far than my own totally non-expert internal thoughts.
A random jumble of things that drove me crazy: There weren’t any citations, which meant that when Glaude started sentences with apparent facts, e.g., “Sociologists have proven that...” I just didn’t believe him. I don’t know why publishers let nonfiction writers off the hook like that, especially when they’re writing about our brave new world of fact-less politics.
There are no deep readings of James Baldwin’s books. It seems like Glaude possibly hasn’t even read Baldwin’s novels. He mentions in the introduction that he did deep readings of Baldwin’s nonfiction work. By specifying “nonfiction,” it seems that Baldwin’s novels just weren’t examined. Which is odd, because Glaude himself mentions many times how critical Baldwin’s literary success was to Baldwin's sense of self—his ability to write a novel could save him from another suicide attempt, and his setbacks drove him repeatedly to the brink. Glaude quotes reviews of Baldwin’s novels, but he doesn’t provide summaries of what occur in the actual stories. I think he literally doesn’t quote one line from one novel or poem. Baldwin’s best, most dazzling prose is found in his novels; to not quote them seems hateful.
I found other stuff generally distasteful, like how Glaude mentions antisemitism perfunctorily but uses Christian-centered language like “New” and “Old Testament.” An editor should have caught that. Didn’t like how he singled Walt Whitman out with the one (1) explicitly racist quote we have on record for Whitman, but didn’t mention anything about how Whitman has been historically viewed and celebrated by Black writers as wide-ranging as Paul Laurence Dunbar, C.L.R. James, Langston Hughes, and June Jordan (read Whitman Noir if you’re interested in learning more). Whitman has a really interesting relationship with race and American democracy; he represents many of the white imaginative failures Glaude talks about when discussing white America’s historical refusal to face the truths of racism. If Waltman was going to be repeatedly brought up, then that should have been acknowledged. But no topic is ever explored with much depth.
At the same time that he was throwing Whitman under the bridge, he thought it was appropriate to talk about Eldridge Cleaver for 11 pages before mentioning that Cleaver was a serial rapist. Oof.
And finally, I stopped trying to like the book when Glaude wrote about how he publicly discouraged Black Americans from voting in the 2016 presidential election. Gross. Gross. I just...no. If I had known that I wouldn’t have bothered picking up the book at all.
For anyone looking for a much better discussion of the history of race in America, try Henry Louis Gates’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow or The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. For anyone looking for more interesting cultural and literary criticism: try Kevin Young’s The Grey Album or Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet. For better books on Baldwin, read Baldwin. I recommend starting with Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Begin Again doesn’t deserve to be about James Baldwin. What a book with such a premise ought to offer: deep insight into Baldwin’s life, deep readings of Baldwin’s work, more than a passing acknowledgment of Baldwin’s queerness, a deep analysis of current events supported by an original, well-defended thesis.
What this book actually is: a very basic biography of Baldwin that highlights his most well-known quotes and occasionally mentions Trump with the same depth as an NPR news article. Anyone who’s read the most famous works of James Baldwin and knows basic stuff about the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement, and Black Lives Matter can walk about from this book having learned literally nothing.
If the statement "Trump's politics were descended from Reagan's" sounds surprising to you, then this book might be very informative. But to me the whole point of writing a book about Baldwin is to speak to people who already know these things. I spent all of 2020 thinking about what James Baldwin would have to say if he were alive today. This book somehow went less far than my own totally non-expert internal thoughts.
A random jumble of things that drove me crazy: There weren’t any citations, which meant that when Glaude started sentences with apparent facts, e.g., “Sociologists have proven that...” I just didn’t believe him. I don’t know why publishers let nonfiction writers off the hook like that, especially when they’re writing about our brave new world of fact-less politics.
There are no deep readings of James Baldwin’s books. It seems like Glaude possibly hasn’t even read Baldwin’s novels. He mentions in the introduction that he did deep readings of Baldwin’s nonfiction work. By specifying “nonfiction,” it seems that Baldwin’s novels just weren’t examined. Which is odd, because Glaude himself mentions many times how critical Baldwin’s literary success was to Baldwin's sense of self—his ability to write a novel could save him from another suicide attempt, and his setbacks drove him repeatedly to the brink. Glaude quotes reviews of Baldwin’s novels, but he doesn’t provide summaries of what occur in the actual stories. I think he literally doesn’t quote one line from one novel or poem. Baldwin’s best, most dazzling prose is found in his novels; to not quote them seems hateful.
I found other stuff generally distasteful, like how Glaude mentions antisemitism perfunctorily but uses Christian-centered language like “New” and “Old Testament.” An editor should have caught that. Didn’t like how he singled Walt Whitman out with the one (1) explicitly racist quote we have on record for Whitman, but didn’t mention anything about how Whitman has been historically viewed and celebrated by Black writers as wide-ranging as Paul Laurence Dunbar, C.L.R. James, Langston Hughes, and June Jordan (read Whitman Noir if you’re interested in learning more). Whitman has a really interesting relationship with race and American democracy; he represents many of the white imaginative failures Glaude talks about when discussing white America’s historical refusal to face the truths of racism. If Waltman was going to be repeatedly brought up, then that should have been acknowledged. But no topic is ever explored with much depth.
At the same time that he was throwing Whitman under the bridge, he thought it was appropriate to talk about Eldridge Cleaver for 11 pages before mentioning that Cleaver was a serial rapist. Oof.
And finally, I stopped trying to like the book when Glaude wrote about how he publicly discouraged Black Americans from voting in the 2016 presidential election. Gross. Gross. I just...no. If I had known that I wouldn’t have bothered picking up the book at all.
For anyone looking for a much better discussion of the history of race in America, try Henry Louis Gates’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow or The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. For anyone looking for more interesting cultural and literary criticism: try Kevin Young’s The Grey Album or Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet. For better books on Baldwin, read Baldwin. I recommend starting with Go Tell It on the Mountain.
allispin's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
4.0