Observer, April 6, 1986. p.26

‘Sparks from an Old Fire’, Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens reviews Evidence of Things Not Seen:

‘After I had finished this book, I was depressed enough to go back and look again at some of JB’s early essays. To my relief, I found that they were as sharp and unsparing as I remembered them. The author of The Fire Next Time used to know the difference between a polemic and a diatribe. With this effort, and its offhand semi-mystical title, he has abandoned that distinction and others too’. ‘There are occasional sparks of the old form. For Baldwin to say, as he does in closing, that blacks are “between the carrot and stick of the American Dream” strikes me as shrewd and well put. To say, as he does earlier, that “the white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross” is to sacrifice a point to an epigram’.