James Baldwin

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**The ABR Podcast**

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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The red thread: Xi Jinping’s ideology of power

by Neil Thomas

This week on The ABR Podcast, Neil Thomas reviews On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is shaping China and the world by Kevin Rudd. Thomas explains that even China watchers find it hard to be clear on the thoughts and plans of the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. They disagree, he tells us, on basic, critical questions, such as for how long Xi will rule. ‘Enter Kevin Rudd’, Thomas writes. ‘In his latest book, former prime minister Kevin Rudd adds a worthy new chapter to his life of public service, digesting thousands of pages of “Xi Jinping Thought” so that you do not have to’. Neil Thomas is a Fellow on Chinese Politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis in Washington DC. Here is Neil Thomas with 'The red thread: Xi Jinping's ideology of power' by Neil Thomas, published in the December issue of ABR.

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James Baldwin this time

by Australian Book Review •

The ABR Podcast

This week on the ABR Podcast, Paul Kane marks the centenary of James Baldwin with an essay on this indispensable prophet. Kane tells us: ‘Baldwin insisted that the only way forward, the only way out [for America], was through a renovation of the self, and this could only be accomplished through deep communication and empathy’. Paul Kane is Professor Emeritus as Vassar College in upstate New York. Listen to Paul Kane’s ‘James Baldwin this time: The centenary of an indispensable prophet’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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James Baldwin this time

by Paul Kane •

August 2024, no. 467

In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois famously declared: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.’ He meant not only in the United States but also elsewhere in the world. As for this century, in America, at least, we can now say it remains the dominant problem. The very fact, for instance, of a movement named ‘Black Lives Matter’ – now a decade old – speaks to something unspeakable: an obvious and overt racism that is driving America to a reckoning.

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The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the debate over race in America by Nicholas Buccola

by Samuel Watts •

April 2020, no. 420

Samuel Watts reviews 'The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the debate over race in America' by Nicholas Buccola

Rising to the lectern amid a tightly packed crowd in the Cambridge Union’s debating hall, James Baldwin began quietly and slowly to speak. ‘I find myself, not for the first time, in the position of a kind of Jeremiah.’ It was February 1965, and Baldwin was in the United Kingdom to promote his third novel, Another Country (1962). Baldwin’s British publicist had asked the Union if they would host the author. Peter Fullerton, the Union’s president, was quick to seize this opportunity, on one condition: that Baldwin participate in a debate.

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