Going to Meet the Man

By: James Baldwin

Narrated by: Dion Graham

"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it."

The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.

©1957, 1958, 1960, 1965 James Baldwin (P)2012 AudioGO

Raw, gripping, beautiful

I can’t help but change a little every time I read his work. Utterly devastating. Completely human.

Great narration

The narrator was one of the best for an audio book I’ve ever listened to. Good musicians add to a work with their own particular take on how it’s played. Good actors do the same with how they deliver lines. Dion Graham does an excellent job reading this so the characters come alive.

Consciousness of the People

James Baldwin never fails to capture the differing consciousness of the American people. Boiling it down to the fact that our experiences shape who we become and that the issues of the world/ our country stem from our missed opportunities to see each other's value as people, not as strangers

Solid narration except...

Very solid narration until "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" in which the narrator had to do French accents for several of the characters; these did not work so well.

Baldwin always rewards

This is a collection of stories, so inevitably some of them are much better than others, but well worth reading. Not as good as
some of his great novels.