Ray Routhier Staff Writer Portland Press Herald (Maine) 07-18-2004 ROOM BY ROOM Byline: Ray Routhier Staff Writer Edition: Final Section: Home & Garden Memo: sidebar room EVERY ROOM IN the Job Lyman House in York has been redesigned and redecorated as part...

BROKEN PROMISES A room, a bed, a toilet, a home Mentally ill find shelter, friends in 2 inner-city buildings where drugs, decay are constant threat Sunday, September 17, 2000 By MEG KISSINGER of the Journa Sentinel staff What...

As a writer Baldwin is as obsessed by sex and family as Strindberg was, but instead of using situations for their dramatic value, Baldwin likes to pile up all possible emotional conflicts as assertions. But for the same reason that in Giovanni's Room Baldwin made everybody white just to show that he could, and in Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone transferred the son-father quarrel to a quarrel with a brother, so one feels about Another Country that Baldwin writes fiction in order to use u...

Giovanni's Room is the best American novel dealing with homosexuality I have read…. [From a recounting of the plot, Giovanni's Room] sounds like a painful novel, which it certainly is. It also sounds like a meretriciously fashionable-sensational one, which it is not…. He successfully avoids the cliché literary attitudes: overemphasis on the grotesque, and the use of homosexuality as a facile symbol for the estrangement which makes possible otherwise unavailable insights in...

Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme [male homosexuality] and treated it with great artistry and restraint [in "Giovanni's Room"]. While he is franker about the physical aspects of male love than other writers who have written on the subject, he manages to retain a very delicate sense of good taste so that his characters never really offend us even when they appear most loathsome, most detestable. This truly remarkable achievement is possible because of Mr. Baldwin's intens...