Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin
(Format used for this read: Audiobook)
The way to describe James Baldwin’s writing is summed up perfectly by my friend Jamila:
He makes me FEEL EVERYTHING.
Here is a summary:
“Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America.”
To say James Baldwin was gifted in his use of words is an extreme understatement.
I can’t even explain the way he so eloquently yet realistically explains things…when that review up there says he touches your heart with emotion yet stimulates the mind that is SPOT ON.
I cried tears of many kinds while listening to this…this is a story about strength, struggle, faith, growth, pain, joy, fear, family, community and transformation.
Go read it y’all.