ON JAMES BALDWIN

This is a serious and, at times, personal discussion of one of America's finest 20th-century writers. Colm Tóibín makes interesting connections between the American Black experience and that of the Irish. In fact, Tóibín winds up making meaningful connections between Baldwin and James Joyce, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde, among others. Gary Furlong's relaxed, pleasant tone and Irish accent make the interesting but sometimes complex intellectual argument easy to listen to. And the argument, although never explicitly stated as such, is that Baldwin deserves consideration not just as a great American writer, but as one of the great writers in English of his century. Listeners may not be convinced, but this should encourage them to go back to his fiction and essays. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2025]