Adewale Maja-Pearce, ‘Evidence of Things not Seen/ James Baldwin’, April 4, 1986, Volume 40, Issue 14, p. 9.

Review of Evidence of Things Not Seen:

‘Baldwin is America’s greatest living writer. I do not say “black” writer; the quality of a writer’s work has nothing to do with colour, through Baldwin’s work has everything to do with the fact of colour and what this means for the sanity of American society. This essay, which is in the tradition of The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street and The Devil Finds Work, takes as its subject the Atlanta child murders of the 1979-1981. This provides a convenient framework for an examination for a society which has become sick. Its peculiar sickness lies in its inability to consider black people as human beings; which, indeed, invented colour and which, having done so, has only succeeded in diminishing itself. This is the essayist’s art, and it is as an essayist that Baldwin will be remembered. I doubt whether a better book than this will be published in the next twelve months’.