NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights
movement to force America to confront its lies about race. In our own moment when that
confrontation feels more urgently needed than ever what can we learn from his struggle?
Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice • In the
midst of an ugly Trump regime and a beautiful Baldwin revival Eddie Glaude has plunged to the
profound depths and sublime heights of Baldwin's prophetic challenge to our present-day
crisis.-Cornel West 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.
