The momentum, feeling and precise intellect with which Baldwin writes absolutely never falters. His assessments of the American history and present are completely astute and look passionately toward a future. Amidst his fury and resentment and fear, Baldwin writes predominantly of love and what it is capable of, if only we allow it to be.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day - for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum-that is, any reality-so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality-for this touchstone can be only oneself.