num_pages: 272
description: We live according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr. in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama's presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others.We have been here before: For James Baldwin these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. In these years spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972 Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.In the story of Baldwin's crucible Glaude suggests we can find hope and guidance through our own after times this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography--drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews--with history memoir and trenchant analysis of our current moment Begin Again is Glaude's endeavor following Baldwin to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race trauma and memory and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.
language: English
title: Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
publisher: Crown/Random House/Penguin Random House LLC