#1 in Essays
The Fire Next Time
- 120
- Pages
- about 2 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“The Fire Next Time” is a brief, intense book on race in America: two essays written as letters, forceful without ever ranting. Addressing the first to his nephew gives Baldwin’s argument an intimate voice. At little over a hundred pages it takes an evening, and a reader today may be struck, painfully, by how current it remains.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Fire Next Time is a 1963 non-fiction book by James Baldwin, containing two essays: "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" and "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind".
Where the score comes from
The sources average 9.1 across 383 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 72% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Essays average of 8.0. That is how 8.8 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 9.0 | 34 | 9% |
| Hardcover | 9.1 | 349 | 91% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Fire Next Time?
It has 120 pages — shorter than 88% of the ranked books in Essays.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Essays — with scores between 7.9 and 8.4, closest to this book.
