Taking a Page from Baldwin: Book-Reading as a Violence Coping and Prevention Strategy

In 1963, James Baldwin told a LIFE magazine reporter: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected to me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”
Baldwin, who wrote and spoke repeatedly about the