Sermon ultimatum confession deposition testament and chronicle ... all presented in searing brilliant prose The New York Times Book Review We the black and the white deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nationJames Baldwins impassioned plea to end the racial nightmare in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963 galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal letters The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwins early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice.A seminal meditation on race by one of our greatest writers Barack ObamaBaldwin writes with great passion ... it reeks of truth as the ghettoes of New York and London Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy Sunday TimesThe great poetprophet of the civil rights movement ... his seminal work Guardian