The Ethical Economy of James Baldwin

Princeton Professor Eddie S. Glaude Explores James Baldwin in a new biogrphy of one of the nation’s greatest essayist. (Photo Credit: Time Magazine)

In Begin Again, James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is, at times, as seething as Shango, the African Orisha deity known for his apoplectic tendencies. During other intervals, within this superbly wrought biography on Baldwin — considered one of the greatest American racial polemicists — Glaude can be as critical as Kant, sapiently quoting at will Whitman and Morrison, Du Bois and…