A Stranger Everywhere - The American Scholar

A Stranger Everywhere - The American Scholar

Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs; Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, 654 pp., $35 In his 2005 book, Democracy Matters, Cornel West calls James Baldwin “this black American Socrates.” I’ve always liked this description of Baldwin. He was a man, after all, who—like Socrates—implored us to “drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question that it hides.” But there are also ways in which the comparison fails. Socrates, at least as he is pr…