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larryerick 's review for:
Going to Meet the Man
by James Baldwin
Simply an outstanding short story collection. Story after story, I kept saying to myself, "Oh, yes, that's very, very true! I never thought of it that way before!" Even the single story that I thought was bordering on mundane, by my standards, had those very same "Ah, hah!" moments. But as good as everything before it was, nothing quite prepares you for the power of the collection's title story, "Going to Meet the Man". If all the stories before it were like a friend gently poking their finger on your chest, to make a point, then "Going to Meet the Man" is an electric cattle prod jammed against your heart and held there. Take all the black civil rights books you've ever read. Distill them into a few brief pages. Add a drop of nitro glycerin for good measure, and then lean back and read. But, while this story specifically covers racial tensions in America, it easily goes further in describing any of all the societal hatreds, whether it be blacks and whites, Catholics and Protestants, Aryans and Jews, Sunnis and Shiites, or any other Us-In-Control versus Them-That-Are-Different dynamic. Powerful, powerful stuff.