Reviews - Going to Meet the Man

367 reviews for:

Going to Meet the Man

James Baldwin

4.34 AVERAGE

erincomeaux's review against another edition

4.0

emotional reflective sad

edesserault's review against another edition

5.0

So happy to have finally read Baldwin and wow I need more ASAP!! Come Out the Wilderness made me cry, definitely one of my new favorite short stories.

aneedleinmybookstack's review against another edition

4.5

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

jesusandsheabutterreads's review against another edition

5.0

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

A masterpiece.

remigves's review against another edition

3.5

challenging reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

trs01's review against another edition

5.0

dark emotional informative reflective sad tense

seeceeread's review against another edition

On the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.

Brothers cowering before their sneering father. Wives sighing as their spouses enact horror. Men struggling to express their anguish in music, on film, in stuttered truths to the few who listen. White boys initiated into manhood through atrocities; Black fathers trying and failing to shield their children from the same. An office worker expected – wrongly – by all her contemporaries to be merely a canvas for their daydreams.

Baldwin makes cultural critique here a blues-infused lament, there a bebop. As he documents his grave disappointment in the United States, he also gestures towards the call-me-home and respond-with-feeling expansiveness of gospel and jazz, art that adores contradiction and yet leaves ample room for expression.

This time through, I noticed the richness of Baldwin's adverbs, his varied sentence structures, and his sometimes jarring jumps in chronology. So much to quote and study.