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Jan 09, 2008

Christy rated it:

James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, an autobiographical novel first published in 1952, is a beautifully written exploration of religious experience in African American life, both North and South. The primary narrative covers less than 24 hours and is focused by the central character's 14th birthday and religious conversion experience. The book is divided into three sections: "The Seventh Day," which focuses on John Grimes, our 14-year-old protagonist, and his decision to turn a More...

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Feb 05, 2011

Velvetink rated it:

My 1982 Collins English dictionary does not have the word mankey. Nor does the Macquarie Dictionary. James Baldwin describes Florence's fur coat as mankey. Baldwin wrote "Go Tell it on the Mountain" in 1954, it was set in the 1930's in Harlem. Did they use the word back then? Did Baldwin time travel to now to use Urban Dictionary? It struck me as ODD and out of place.
MANKEY.
1.The name of a white furry Pokemon with a snout.
I tried to capture a Mankey in my Pokeball, More...

14 comments like (6 people liked it)

Feb 21, 2008

matt rated it:

Reading this, years ago, I was struck by something I didn't think I'd be struck with.

Recognition!

I was reaised religious, not in anything close to the kind of religiostity he describes- visceral, pummeling, hyperintense- but pretty far-reaching and existential in my own right, if I do say so myself.

Anyway, I was throttled by the sheer force and passion and earnestness of the writing here. I've been on that threshing floor, and even as I feel self-consci More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Nov 27, 2007

Bookchica rated it:

Go Tell It On The Mountain is a very bold book. In an era when "Ebonics" had not been coined yet, when being black was not every white kids style, James Baldwin stayed so true to the African-American colloquialism. James Baldwin has written with complete truthfulness and self-questioning this parable of finding yourself, finding your belief, finding your God. Are these even different things, or is it one? It is this honesty which keeps you engrossed. Whether you'll end up loving this b More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 11, 2008

Phayvanh rated it:

At a time when I was spirialing in self-doubt and slight depression, when I was trying to figure out life and find myself, I found this book while browsing the shelves at the San Frnacisco public librry and lived these lives with such passion and clarity I was brought back into the realm of sensousness and divinity. I read this book and felt saved. Saved from the torture of having to live life alone, from the limp mass-market suspense thrillers that were mere diversions of the soul, saved from More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Aug 24, 2010

Jimmy rated it:

When I was vacationing in Chicago recently, I went to a used bookstore and saw some James Baldwin books. I've heard many good things about him, so I decided to get this book... an old paperback edition (not the white one pictured above) for $5.

The next morning, flipping through my stack of newly purchased books, I noticed to my amazement that this book was signed! And signed "For Jimmy". Unbelievable:

So I felt like it was fate that brought this bo More...

5 comments like (7 people liked it)

Apr 27, 2011

Teresa rated it:

I'm very impressed with how self-assured and commanding Baldwin's first novel is, especially in its structure, and its gritty and poetic prose.

The author's empathy for his characters, even an extremely hypocritical one, is strong too. The difficulty of the adult characters' pasts was most compelling to me, as they can't help but look backward even as they try to forget. The bitterness of the main character's mother, on a day when she might be happy, is subtle and understandable aft More...

16 comments like (6 people liked it)

Mar 02, 2010

Hazel rated it:

Rereading for the LFPC group. Last read this ages ago, perhaps in my teens or early twenties. I had completely forgotten what a powerful piece of writing this is. I think I was too young to truly appreciate it.

Today I am struck by the rhythms of Baldwin's prose, the harrowing picture he paints of the individual psyche, the family dynamic and the society, all twisted by racism. I recognise the place of theology for a people making sense of the world as they find it, and of particular More...

3 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 11, 2008

Shep rated it:

First, this book feels like an epic and it's only two hundred and fifty pages. Second, it hurts like hell, and this is because it's too real. One line that struck me particularly was when a sister challenges her brother that his faith is fake, since all it ever did was hurt people, which is no change from who he was before conversion. I should have the book to hand and set it down, but maybe you should just read it. The obvious conclusion is that I need to read more Baldwin, but while hhis s More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 11, 2012

Adam rated it:

This is a single day in the life of a boy in a black Harlem evangelical church. Throughout, Baldwin relentlessly describes religious experience in brutally physical terms:

“This power had struck John, in the head or in the heart; and, in a moment, wholly, filling him with an anguish that he could never in his life have imagined, that he surely could not endure, that even now he could not believe, had opened him up had cracked him open, as wood beneath the axe cracks down the middle, a More...

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Jan 18, 2012

Judy rated it:

I had always heard of this book but somehow never read it before. It is a powerful story about a young man raised in Harlem by his stepfather who is a preacher. The family are all members of a fundamentalist church and while racism plays a part in their lives, it is the religious angle that Baldwin emphasizes.

John is fourteen, in fact it is his birthday. Throughout the course of the day, when his birthday seems to have been forgotten by the family (not for the first time), we are More...

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Nov 28, 2011

Kevin rated it:

This was a great book. It started a little slow for me, but really picked up. It is the story of a teenager in Harlem who is confronting the various temptations that people of his age face, and struggling with the path his seemingly unloving preacher father wants him to take, or the road that many of his peers embrace. It really hits its stride when it goes into the background of his father, mother, and aunt and brings to the surface all the struggles they have dealt with. It also has a very More...

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Oct 05, 2011

Michael rated it:

I've always been around a lot of Christians since I was young and I often offend them. I was hoping to get a little positive insight into their lives here. Instead Baldwin underlined the prejudices I already had against them. "I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore" and "you made enough folks pay for sin, it's time you start paying" are a few of my favorite quotes from the book. Black or white, these are the Christians I know. They make people feel dirty More...

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Apr 14, 2011

Rachel rated it:

Go Tell It on the Mountain is the story of a young African American boy growing up in Harlem in the early twentieth century. He struggles with his desire to win his father’s approval and God’s. Additionally, John is faced with several other trials and tribulations of growing up in poverty in the 1930’s. What John does not seem to understand is that the thing he wants most—his father’s approval—will never occur because he does not realize that the man he thinks is his father is actually his stepf More...

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Mar 23, 2011

Linda rated it:

The morning of that day, as Gabriel rose and started out to work, the sky was low and nearly black and the air too thick to breathe. Late in the afternoon the wind rose, the skies opened, and the rain came. The rain came down as though once more in Heaven the Lord had been persuaded f the good uses of a flood. It drove before it the bowed wanderer, clapped children into houses, licked with fearful anger against the high, strong wall, and the wall of the lean-to, and the wall of the cabin, beat a More...

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Mar 09, 2011

Annie rated it:

James Baldwin’s book focuses on an African American family in the 1930s, their relationships with one another and the role of religion in shaping identity. The main protagonist of the story is a boy named John, whose relationship with his father, Gabriel, a minister at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, is strained at best. The book flashes into different characters viewpoints and is split into the sections of John, Florence; Gabriel’s sister, Gabriel, Elizabeth, Gabriel’s second wife and John’s More...

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Jul 28, 2011

Tim rated it:

Interpretation can be everything. The subjectivity involved in the interpretation of life becomes an individual’s reality. Interpretation is also a process of discovery. Done right, discovery incorporates an open minded approach to life. This applies to politics, culture, religion, career, etc. How you perceive your world and what you perceive its meaning to be becomes your motivation, inspiration, aspiration and perspiration.

Religion and scripture are the perfect illustration of how i More...

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May 10, 2011

Jason rated it:

First things first: Baldwin can write his ass off; he just has a way with words that are imperceptibly profound and flow beautifully. This is a deeply religious novel and while I tend to me ambivalent towards such subject matter, I found myself challenged and also captivated by the influence Christianity has on the lives of these characters and the complex way religion drives the story about the Grimes family as each member struggles with their faith in seeking salvation. An engrossing coming-o More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 22, 2010

Sandra rated it:

This book is interesting on many levels. On the surface, it is a story about a boy coming of age both physically and spiritually; a sexual awakening amidst a family's religious background. John, the main character, has a sense he will go out into the world and "sin" even though he is bound by his own morals and by society. It is about a boy on the verge of accepting his homosexuality.

What struck me was the structure that Baldwin uses to tell John's story. It's not only Joh More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 06, 2009

Colin rated it:

I was disappointed with this book. When I first started reading it, there was something queer about the main character John. That got me interested. He didn't fit in with his family or his community, and in his wandering around the city, I thought he was going to cast out on his own, building some kind of new existence.

That didn't happen, and maybe I was a bit naive in wanting it. After finishing, I thought about the open environments for a black man in this time period, and ob More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 13, 2010

El Habib rated it:

I read this fabulous emotion-filled novel in my last year of the university when I was getting ready for a master's degree in Race,Alterity and Post-colonial discourse. I loved it so much and I was amazed essentially by its sincere description of internal black American feelings towards the growing power of a fake religious father.I loved this novel for its uneasiness while it develops with the sentimentality of the protagonist as he was contrasted to his brother.

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jul 31, 2011

Apersephone rated it:

Once I read the last part “The Threshing Floor” (Quote for the last chapter: “Then said I, Woe is Me for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of people with unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”) which describes an experience of what it is to “be saved” (perhaps, even perversely, saved means to change a child’s eyes and mind begin to assess the non childlike world that exists beginning slowly to push out childhood), I immediately More...

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Jul 12, 2009

Sarah rated it:

Langston Hughes described this book and its author as using words like the sea uses waves. There is no other way to describe it. The prose, the language, the stories that unfold in this book wash upon the shores of the mind sometimes volatile, sometimes languishing, but always ceaseless.
The novel starts with the narrative of John who awakes on his fourteenth birthday in a panic. An epiphany awakens him before anyone else and in his panic he realizes that he stands at a fork in the road of More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Oct 03, 2010

Teresa rated it:

James Baldwin s semi-autobiographical novel, set primarily in 1930s Harlem, depicts John s spiritual struggle, and it is John s thoughts, expressed by an omniscient third-person narrator, that frame the novel. In the middle section, we step inside the prayers of John s aunt, his father, and his mother. We learn what circumstances led them to behave as they do and why John s father is so cold.[return][return]Although Go Tell It on the Mountain is sometimes pigeon-holed as an African-American More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 03, 2011

Trice rated it:

struck by John's vision and by the perception in 'The Prayers of the Saints'. I can't imagine being able to see this clearly into the lives around me. I wonder, though if his father was broken under all that pride and judgement; did he ever despair of himself deep in his own heart? The sadness he spreads around him doubled by his need for another man's son to fail that he might not be condemned in himself for his own sons' failures to live or even to barely seek after holy lives. Somehow he miss More...

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Oct 20, 2010

Mark rated it:

Started out with a lot of potential that it veered away from in the end. I feel like I am bringing my own bias to bear in saying that - but then, what else do I have to bring? The novel is set in Harlem in the 1930s, with flashbacks into the past of several characters as they consider things that have gone before during a Saturday night prayer meeting. I am not much of a friend to organized religion nowadays, and the kind of evangelism going on in here - people speaking in tongues, talking about More...

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Apr 29, 2007

Megan rated it:

It's no doubt that the language is beautiful, I'll give Baldwin that. And it was good. Very good. I wish that he had written another 100 pages, at least, because this is one of those books where I'd be content if it never ended, and I was trapped into reading this story forever. I'm not entirely sure that I agree with Baldwin's religious views, but he certainly believes in them, and I can do nothing but respect him for that.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 21, 2011

Veronica rated it:

What a phenomenal book this was. Baldwin’s storytelling abilities are remarkable. Not only is Go Tell it on the Mountain a great tale, but we actually get into the characters’ souls and understand them as if we’ve become them. The reader has the privilege of being on the inside, so to speak, so fully understands the misperceptions that surround the various characters.

Set primarily in 1930′s Harlem, we meet the Grimes family and come to know them quite intimately. With the patriarc More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 14, 2009

Fathima rated it:

what is the term for internalised male hatred of penises? and, perhaps more importantly, why is that said term, if it exists, isn't commonly known? there's a lot going on in Baldwin's debut novel, and much of it has to do with christian (which sect?) anxieties around sex. the male characters are particularly guilt-ridden, not just about the act of having sex itself, but everything relating to it, which ultimately comes down to an acute hatred of their penises, which more than once they refer to More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 18, 2009

Hannah rated it:

I was a little biased from the start reading this because I was pretty mad at James Baldwin for being such a jerk to Richard Wright after Wright had kind of taken him under his wing and helped him out, only then to have his writings roundly criticized by Baldwin. I think Baldwin was right on some points, but a pretty under-handed thing to do to your mentor.

Over all, the book was a pretty severe indictment of the black church at the time, especially of the hypocrisy of some of its le More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

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