By: Marc Shapiro James Baldwin's book The fire Next Time opens up an entirely new world to It opens the reader to the harsh world of a black boy growing into a man in the poor city slums and all of the issues that a black man has to face. This book does more for the reader than any article published about the black's living in the poor cities in terms of exposure for the reader. The reason why it has this ability is how James Baldwin wrote it. He was able to express all of himself in the essay form with a storytelling technique. Together these two techniques combine to form a collection of essays on what blackness means in America. What makes this form of writing nice for the reader is that by combining many different essays you are able to learn about many different areas of a black man's life. In his collection of essays there is a light shined on the relationship between blacks and whites. Baldwin throughout the book discusses the idea that to be successful in the world that we live you have to live in a white world. This creates a problem because then you have blacks who want to be successful but the whites will not except them. Baldwin deconstructs the myths that surround blackness in America and sets out as a possibility that blacks must learn to accept whites but whites don't have to do the same. Even though he has these thoughts he is not anti white. He understands that one day in this world whites and blacks will have to come together and live as one in order to be successful as a whole. A part of the book that he states this goes, "In short we, the black and white deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation-if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women". This is a very importan...
