At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable.
For between Leo’s childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo’s loyalty. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war. Overpowering in its vitality, extravagant in the intensity of its feeling, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is a major work of American literature.
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“James Baldwin’s story of the mid-century African–American experience is told in the first person by the character Leo Proudhammer, ably voiced here by Kevin Kenerly…Listeners meet most of the people who have been important in his life. Kenerly distinguishes them by accents, even modulating Leo’s own childhood voice from that of a Harlem street kid in the earliest memories to the trained cadences of his Broadway years. Kenerly’s control of accent and dialect is masterful. There are sections that could come across as rants that he turns into passages of moving emotional development. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
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