apparently I like hockey now?

Nonfiction

The Price of The Ticket (borrow from IA)

The Fire Next Time (pdf download)

Notes of A Native Son (pdf download)

Nothing Personal (read on IA - not great quality sorry)

The Last Interview (pdf download) (only 10 pages!)

Fiction

Giovanni's Room (pdf download)

If Beale Street Could Talk (pdf download)

BONUS

Little Man Little Man (read or pdf download on scribd) (Baldwin's only children's book)

Go Tell It On The Mountain (pdf download)

Another Country (pdf and epub download)

Sonny's Blues (pdf download)

Is it this one? I’ve always love this extract about him; it’s so fantastically true:

As a rule, Crosby does his interviews while sitting. Like all genuinely strong people, he prefers the weaker position. It’s hard to badger a guy from above.

We all cluster around his locker ready to be charmed by his presence. We know he won’t say anything interesting. Crosby is an interesting guy, but he has excised that part of himself for public consumption.

There’s no advantage for Crosby to be seen as edgy or slightly ahead of conventional thinking. Few players have ever so ruthlessly exploited advantages like Crosby does.

He’s asked about a couple of the day’s Hall of Fame inductees – Dominik Hasek and Peter Forsberg. Crosby has learned the experienced interviewee’s trick of repeating your question back to you as a statement. Hasek was “unbelievable.” Forsberg “loved to compete.” This doesn’t mean anything, but everyone nods like Crosby’s handing out stone tablets.

Someone brings up the slow fade of the enforcer – a topic with small potential for controversy. Crosby says, “That’s just the way the game’s evolved. Everyone adjusts accordingly. There’s definitely been some change. That’s just one of the many things that, with time, you see changes.”

You ask him about the disappearance of fighting, and Crosby tells you fighting is disappearing. It’s a hell of a trick.

so, so many well-meaning people going “well, if feeling punk is what makes people be nice and do nice things, let them say they’re punk!” to which, yeah, i can’t stop them

my objection isn't "being nice isn't punk, therefore don't be nice”

my objection is that we've reached a point where every positive human behavior gets reframed as an aesthetic identity instead of just being a positive human behavior

if you think helping people is good, then help people because it's good!

if you think kindness is good, be kind because it's good!

i don't understand the need to run every moral action through a "but is it punk?" filter first, especially when a lot of the people doing this have no actual interest in punk as a culture, music scene, history, or political tradition (for better or for worse)

at a certain point "punk" just becomes shorthand for "thing i personally approve of," and then the word stops meaning anything at all

Here's an amazing story about him that I read years ago and never forgot.

I'd hoped to meet him at a convention, myself, one day.