Rating: 
Summary: vivid and amazing
Review: This is a fascinating, vivid, and amazing book, about relationships between people. Not an easy read, and not a pretty picture of Greenwich Village and its inhabitants (prostitution, infidelity, drug abuse, suicide are among the issues), but an extremely effective and emotionally haunting one. It explores gender, race, and sexuality from a sympathetic and humanistic viewpoint, and has the power to shock even today, forty years after it was written.
Rating: 
Summary: A timeless masterpeice
Review: This is an exquisitely beautiful novel! It is unapologetically and stunningly emotionally REAL. At heart, it is about human beings trying mightily and messily to first find what it means to be true to themselves, and second, to live (and live with)that truth, despite the various oppressive forces (including self-desctructiveness and "benign" neglect), that permeate their lives. The story is about friendship and amour, about the nitty-gritty of racism, sexism, homophobia and classism,and the universal alienation of artists within a materialism driven society. The passionate unforgetable characters are cast in Balwdin's typically elegant but hard-hitting prose. This is not a novel for the "feint of heart", as it delves deeply into much that might be called the "dark" underside f the American Dream. Open-minded readers will find their souls and intellects confronted with all manner of considerations about what kinds of dreams may be dreamt, and who among us may dream them.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning, Complex and written before its time
Review: This is an extremely intense, beautiful, and believable book about the complicated textures of relationships. Not only about the "typical" man-woman union, Baldwin's richly woven story also contains homosexual and bisexual relationships; inter-racial relationships; intricate and deeply explored male friendships; and, to a lesser degree (though with no less accuracy), the careful dance of women's friendships. The relationship between blacks and whites. The relationship between racists and non-racists. The relationship between the rich and the poor, between sell-outs and non sell-outs. So much is touched upon and examined in this novel that the 436 pages seem more like 600, and by the end I found myself taking notes. But the complexity was not at all daunting. Because of Baldwin's deep (but never boring) detailing and because of the fact that all of these topics are limited to the lives of six main characters, I was completely enthralled and moved, and often had to pause to consider my own feelings and viewpoints.To me, this book is amazing simply because James Baldwin is able to make a thirty year old midwestern girl feel as though she thoroughly knows and understands a fictional group of struggling and eclectic writers and musicians from 1960's New York City. With _Another Country_, so aptly titled because Rufus, Vivaldo, Cass, Richard, Eric and Ida each seem to have their own, Baldwin was also able to further open a mind I thought was pretty wide already.
Rating:
Summary: the universal language of love
Review: This is an extremely intense, beautiful, and believable book about the complicated textures of relationships. Not only about the "typical" man-woman union, Baldwin's richly woven story also contains homosexual and bisexual relationships; inter-racial relationships; intricate and deeply explored male friendships; and, to a lesser degree (though with no less accuracy), the careful dance of women's friendships. The relationship between blacks and whites. The relationship between racists and non-racists. The relationship between the rich and the poor, between sell-outs and non sell-outs. So much is touched upon and examined in this novel that the 436 pages seem more like 600, and by the end I found myself taking notes. But the complexity was not at all daunting. Because of Baldwin's deep (but never boring) detailing and because of the fact that all of these topics are limited to the lives of six main characters, I was completely enthralled and moved, and often had to pause to consider my own feelings and viewpoints. To me, this book is amazing simply because James Baldwin is able to make a thirty year old midwestern girl feel as though she thoroughly knows and understands a fictional group of struggling and eclectic writers and musicians from 1960's New York City. With _Another Country_, so aptly titled because Rufus, Vivaldo, Cass, Richard, Eric and Ida each seem to have their own, Baldwin was also able to further open a mind I thought was pretty wide already.
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