Go Tell It on the Mountain

Author - James Baldwin ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Mass Market Paperback Book item from Dell was reviewed on 4-Nov-2008.

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1) Mass Market Paperback Book Go Tell It on the Mountain by Dell. It´s funny, the reviewer below me also first read this back in the 70´s - as did I. I started out the unofficial beginning of this Fall by re-reading the "classics." Some are actual classics, and others are Lit i have left over from college and high school. Not sure where this one fits in.

I just finished this book, and feel it´s one of the best books i ever read. It´s not an "easy read." You do have to get ready to understand the jumping back and forth to different eras. But once you do, it´s worth the effort to read - totally.

Just a wonderful book and story, and fantastically written. I´m in awe of it. I love finishing a book that really leaves you saying "wow."¤

2) Mass Market Paperback Book Go Tell It on the Mountain by Dell. I wanted to dislike this book. James Baldwin is anathema to me--but this book--as a work of art, as an example of human effort--is outstanding.

Not at first, though. The exordium is tedious and boring, and I was flipping pages with alacrity, saying to myself: "AHA! Overrated! And I know why." But once the narrative sea-legs get set with the history of Gabriel Grimes, the novel becomes special. You can tell Baldwin read almost every book in his local library, and that he had uncommon talent at organizing words, piecing sentences together, and constructing something greater than the sum of its parts.

The heavy emphasis on religion would normally be an impediment to my enjoyment of any work, but here, though it did get old, it did not vitiate the flow. God played an important role in young Baldwin´s life, and the book reflects those years.

The MLA has decreed to the unwashed masses that Go Tell It On The Mountain is the thirty-ninth best novel of the 20th century. That places it ahead of superior works such as Pale Fire, Of Human Bondage, and Lord of the Flies (to name only three), but also behind inferior works such as To The Lighthouse and the Studs Lonigan Trilogy.

No matter the placement, this is a significant book that deserves to be read on its own merits.¤

3) Mass Market Paperback Book Go Tell It on the Mountain by Dell. I was excited to read this book, however turned out disappointed. The book revolves around several different individual plots that are hard to follow. The characters are confusing, and there is no division between the present and the past. The whole time, I felt a negativity towards Christianity (even though I am a Christian). Also, I was shocked by the amount of sexual material in a book focused on Christianity in the African American Church. It is weird to be reading about breasts in the same book where a lot of the plot takes place in a church.
Hypocrisy is a major theme. John, the main character, sees this hypocrisy in the church and has a very negative view of the church. Suddenly, all his hesitancy towards the faith is wiped clean during his conversion. I have a hard time understanding how he could change, even though everyone around him is still the same (except his "father", who seems to get worse). What happened with "The Letter"?
The book is really confusing and just seemed really negative. Every character has a tragedy. I found that every time I put the book down, I was in a negative mood.¤

4) Mass Market Paperback Book Go Tell It on the Mountain by Dell. The first time I encountered this book was on a summer reading list in middle school. The title alone was so appealing I spend the rest of English class daydreaming what it was about. I didn´t get around to actually reading it for nearly 30 years. Now I wish I had read it much sooner.

Not then, at the tender age of 13. The rude realities of Harlem life circa 1930 come at you right away. Never mind that the protagonist, John, is 14; I probably wouldn´t have gotten very far given the novel´s unsentimental look at the hard realities of life, the baseness of sex, and the shortcomings of religion.

Yes, "Go Tell It On The Mountain" is a tough book, but it´s brilliant, too. Baldwin gives us the story of John, who in the course of a single day wavers between faith and doubt, love and hate, community and isolation, culminating at a "tarry service" at a Harlem storefront church where the man he calls father, Gabriel, is deacon. Gabriel is not, however, John´s real father, nor is he that great an exemplar of faith, something we learn as Baldwin´s narrative effortlessly takes us across time and space into the heads of John, Gabriel, and others at the tarry service, where extraordinary events are about to take place.

I wasn´t expecting "Go Tell" to be so good, but it is, not because Baldwin draws on big themes so much as the visceral way he presents them, every emotion raw. John´s enormous self-doubt is the fulcrum upon which the rest of the novel turns; looking at himself in the mirror, he wants to know "whether his face was ugly or not".

It´s a story about growing up black and poor in a racist society, but it´s more about the stuff of life, a universal tale about growing up. Gabriel is a tough man, but when we get inside his head we discover a more complicated story, about a man who tries to stand up for his faith but keeps being undone by his baser passions. His religiosity, an easy target for many readers, only serves to cloak his essential stubbornness.

For a first novel, "Go Tell" is amazingly accomplished. Baldwin moves effortlessly back and forth in time, like Faulkner, yet you feel completely connected to reality throughout. His narrative has the moment-by-moment feeling of Joyce, but without the ephemera. He finds the core of every character he lights upon, which he reveals with such studied gradualness he sweeps you along with every soap-opera-ish development.

Baldwin´s 1953 novel seems a proclamation of his life´s calling. John is not presented as a fledging writer, but his truth-seeking, and truth-finding, is one any committed person of letters can relate to. At the end of the book, when the sun lights upon John´s forehead and affixes a "seal ineffaceable forever", it is the writer´s call he is discovering.

Baldwin says this was the book that made his career possible; I sense many others could say the same. It´s a book with a lot of gas in the tank. Like I said, I only wish I had read it sooner.¤

5) Mass Market Paperback Book Go Tell It on the Mountain by Dell. James Baldwin´s Go Tell It on the Mountain
deals with a lot of issues that are explored
in all of his works. The themes of religion,
identity and sexuality, which were themes
that were very taboo at the time and in some
ways still are. I think most of the bad
reviews on here are either people not sure
of their own religious beliefs. I will agree
though that this is not Baldwin´s best work;
that is conferred upon Going to Meet the Man,
Giovanni´s Room and Another Country, which
deal with the religious themes subtly. Still,
if you are are a history buff, read it for
the fascinating details of Harlem life in its
heyday. Baldwin is one of those writers whom
you have to read over and over again. Each time,
you discover something else wonderful about him
that you missed before. I guess I´m biased though,
as I love most of his books.¤

6) Mass Market Paperback Book Go Tell It on the Mountain by Dell. James Baldwin´s stunning first novel is now an  American classic. With startling realism that brings  Harlem and the black experience vividly to life,  this is a work that touches the heart with emotion  while it stimulates the mind with its narrative  style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism  in America. Moving through time from the rural  South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the  attitudes of two generations of an embattles  family, Go Tell It On The Mountain  is an unsurpassed portrayal of human beings caught  up in a dramatic struggle and of a society  confronting inevitable change.

"The most important  novel written about the American Negro,"  says Commentary. "It is written  with poetic intensity and great narrative skill,"  writes Harper´s.  Saturday Review praises it as "masterful,"  and the San Francisco Chronicle  declares that this important American novel is  "brutal, objective and compassionate."¤

7) Mass Market Paperback Book Go Tell It on the Mountain by Dell. First published in 1953 when James Baldwin was nearly 30, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a young man´s novel, as tightly coiled as a new spring, yet tempered by a maturing man´s confidence and empathy. It´s not a long book, and its action spans but a single day--yet the author packs in enough emotion, detail, and intimate revelation to make his story feel like a mid-20th-century epic. Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression. John´s parents, praying beside him, both wrestle with the ghosts of their sinful pasts--Gabriel, a preacher of towering hypocrisy, fathered an illegitimate child during his first marriage down South and refused to recognize his doomed bastard son; Elizabeth fell in love with a charming, free-spirited young man, followed him to New York, became pregnant with his son, and lost him before she could reveal her condition.

Baldwin lays down the terrible symmetries of these two blighted lives as the ironic context for John´s dark night of the soul. When day dawns, John believes himself saved, but his creator makes it clear that this salvation arises as much from blindness as revelation: "He was filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered."

Though it was hailed at publication for its groundbreaking use of black idiom, what is most striking about Go Tell It on the Mountain today is its structure and its scope. In peeling back the layers of these damaged lives, Baldwin dramatizes the story of the great black migration from rural South to urban North. "Behind them was the darkness," Baldwin writes of Gabriel and Elizabeth´s lost generation, "nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" This is Baldwin´s music--a music in which rhapsody is rooted anguish--and there is none finer in American literature. --David Laskin¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 2-Dec-2008, 04403300769780440330073, 650-040-760-640-2X0-111-8

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