• About this Book
• Read an Excerpt

Written by James Baldwin

• Format: Trade Paperback, 144 pages
 
• Publisher: Vintage
• On Sale: September 13, 2011
• Price: $14.00
• ISBN: 978-0-307-27595-0 (0-307-27595-7)

about this book

Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist. Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness. And here too is the stunning prose of a writer whose passion never diminished his struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

“If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one.” —Michael Ondaatje

“The best essayist in this country—a man whose power has always been in his reasoned, biting sarcasm; his insistence on removing layer by layer the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country.” —The New York Times Book Review

“It will be hard for the reader to see these films in quite the same way again.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“He has taken the old subject of race and made it even more personal probing perhaps more deeply than ever before into American racial practices.” —The Nation

“A provocative discussion.” —Saturday Review