Just Above My Head - by James Baldwin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

James Baldwin's final novel is "the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers" (The New York Times Book Review).

Arthur Montana, celebrated gospel singer, has been found collapsed in a London pub at the age of thirty-nine. His brother, Hall, is left to write the story of his life, his talent, and his great love. Retracing the past three decades of their history, Hall writes with tender passion about the central characters in Arthur's life: Sister Julia, a "fire-baptized" child evangelist called to the ministry when she was nine, whose life seems considerably less "redeemed" out of the pulpit; and Julia's brother Jimmy, Arthur's most gifted accompanist, the catalyst of his success as a singer, and his devoted lover.

An unforgettable epic drama spanning the distance from the Apollo in Harlem to the Olympia in Paris, Just Above My Head is a magnificent tale of personal courage, commitment, and profound love filled with all the lyricism, violence, and compassion that comprise the human condition.

Review Quotes

"A fine novel . . . it seems impossible for [Baldwin] to write with anything other than eloquence. His great and peculiar power is to recreate the maddening halfway house that the black man finds himself in late-twentieth-century America."
--The New Yorker

"The work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers . . . glimpses of family life in Harlem, rapturous music-making in the churches, moments of uneasiness in even the most casual meetings between whites and blacks--scenes that Baldwin seems preternaturally gifted in understanding."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Moralistic fervor, a high literary seriousness, the authority of the survivor, of the witness--these qualities made Baldwin unique."
--The New York Review of Books

"Some of the finest scenes in recent American literature. Baldwin expands the territory of the black novel."
--The Village Voice

"In this monolithic, turbulent novel of black families caught in thirty years of a murderous century, the power of love redeems the dead as well as the living."
--Paul Bowles, The Atlanta Journal & Constitution

"Baldwin is at his earthy best. Deliberately shocking and writing as brilliantly as ever about 'how it was and how it is.'"
--The Kansas City Star

"In Baldwin's work . . . race and sex are the arenas in which we fight for love."
--The Nation

"This is familiar Baldwin territory--that unique mixture of black family life and religious experience, of anger and frank sexuality that stimulated the American conscience."
--Library Journal

About the Author

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were bestsellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.