Word: baldwin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Colored Girls roused theatergoers while Pat Harris ruled HUD, so that was the Year of the Black Woman. This year must be the Year of the Black Relationship, since both Time and Newsweek wrote on that subject. Baldwin thinks so too. His newest novel, Just Above My Head, scrutinizes almost every possible variation of the black love relationship, homosexual to conjugal to incestuous to fraternal, while simultaneously indulging Baldwin's familiar obsession with the black church. His approach produces an odd melange of eroticism and spiritualism, which seems to alternate between embarrassing explicitness and slightly cloying romanticism. However, the book...
...pianist brother Jimmy, and Arthur's mysterious death at the peak of his fame. The novel reads as if authored by Hall in an effort to understand his brother's life as an artist, in order to legitimize his need for art in a rapidly changing society. Though Baldwin halfheartedly attempts to detach himself from the character of Hall, it is clear Hall's observations about Arthur are really Baldwin's about himself as a writer and a black person in the changing America of today...
...retired to his wife's home town of Clarksville, Tenn., and found public affairs more interesting than the restaurant into which he had sunk some of his service savings. Gesturing with his cigarette holder, he says: "I'm trying to prove you can turn things around." Charlotte Baldwin, the slim, red-haired wife of a dentist from Madisonville...
Dealing with constituents who are also neighbors and acquaintances can be sticky. Charlotte Baldwin, her town's first woman mayor, dresses with a certain flair in Lexington, but sighs that back home in Madisonville she cannot wear her chic sandals on business calls. She feels that conventional pumps will help encourage citizens to take her seriously. Joe Viens remembers a voter who came in to remind the mayor of his campaign support, then presented a traffic ticket to be fixed. Viens said sorry, the only way he could help would be to pay the fine...
Those who are supposedly part-time officials, like Baldwin, make as little as $85 a week. Even the full-time incumbents get meager pay, from which must be deducted the psychic cost of public cynicism. Don Quaintance of Marion, Ohio, a white-haired, avuncular former businessman who got to the mayor's chair in middle age, thinks that kind of attitude has grown a lot during his eight years in office. He bitterly recalls a dinner with his wife and some friends at the country club. Talk got around to inflation and the size of his salary...