James Baldwin The life album

Zaborowska (Univ. of Michigan) adds to her considerable canon of scholarship on James Baldwin--such as James Baldwin's Turkish Decade (CH, Jul'09, 46-6073) and Me and My House (2018)--with this latest offering from Yale University Press. Zaborowska's mission is to explore Baldwin's private life beyond his well-crafted public persona to excavate what she terms his Black queer humanism while acknowledging that he frequently eschewed such labels. Along with Eddie Glaude Jr., Zaborowska serves as one of our greatest witnesses in the academy to Baldwin's legacy. Her discussion, for instance, of Baldwin's conversation with Margaret Mead threads several very nuanced needles. This volume offers something quite refreshing. Without losing any of her usual incisive analysis, Zaborowska takes a very personal approach. She begins with a letter to Baldwin. The work is divided not by chapters but by "tracks," such as one would find on a blues or jazz album. The reader has a full sense of both witness and subject in conversation, which heightens the reader's experience. Frankly, more scholarship should be like this. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through professionals. --Anthony P. Pennino, Stevens Institute of Technology

A tribute to an influential queer Black trailblazer. Part of Yale University Press' Black Lives series, academic and Baldwin authority Zaborowska's gracefully impassioned biography of the queer author and activist's life and legacy focuses on his intimate social and professional intercourse, his travels, and the evolution of his sexuality. Formatted like an album on vinyl, the book intensively explores Baldwin's private life through a succession of record "sides" and "tracks." She makes great use of archival information on Baldwin, his emerging humanistic philosophy, as well as the diversity of his distinguished literary oeuvre, the expanse and importance of his home in France until his death, and a trove of unpublished writings that spin a fresh perspective on her subject's artistic evolution and how he lived life outside of the public eye. Through the lens of Black queer humanism, which Zaborowska believes has the power to "connect Baldwin's time to ours," she pinpoints and highlights the episodes and formative influences occurring in Baldwin's domestic life. These influences include his upbringing in Harlem; many impressionable early educators; his beloved mother's presence; his pious stepfather's brutality; various sexuality, identity, and gender struggles; and political lessons learned from Black feminists. All of these were artistically channeled into the creation of his essays, novels, and confessional notes that formed the heft and enduring impact of his legacy. Readers seeking a linear biographical timeline of Baldwin's artistic and personal life will not find it here, but will instead delightfully discover Baldwin's existence brilliantly and honorably "remixed" by Zaborowska. Her book vividly celebrates the "auto-ethnographical repetition" and "cyclical, achronological narrative style" of Baldwin's timeless writings and enthusiastically reassembles his personal life by spotlighting the intimate, intensive, formative moments that shaped him as a queer Black artist and a man. A creatively conceived appreciation for a decorated life and its far-flung influences on race, queer culture, and art. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.