James Baldwin is a disarming man, against whom it is necessary to arm ourselves. Which, oddly enough, may be what he is trying to tell us.

[In The Fire Next Time he] has written an indictment of Western civilization—more precisely, of that civilization's religion, of "the white God"—that is carefully and consciously "outrageous." He edges toward us—in every sentence—his credentials as the most sensitive and discriminating articulator of Negro suffering; while, fully aware of the incongruity, he constructs an intricate sympathy for the crudest kind of Negro racism, that of Elijah Muhammad and his Black Muslims. There is virtuosity, even a dark gaiety in his anger: he does not try to hide the logical weaknesses in his argument, considered solely as an argument. He candidly bases his view of religion on his special experience of "the church racket": at the age of fourteen, he...