Let’s just get this straight, first off: You won’t like this week’s book.

I read James Baldwin’s book — actually it’s more of an essay, or a couple long letters — The Fire Next Time just because I’m up for hearing people out. Baldwin is a black writer and an angry man.

One can see why. We know blacks have suffered generations of indignities at the hands of white people. One incident left Baldwin so enraged, “[i]t book a vast amount of patience not to strangle” the perpetrator.

He knows anger can be corrosive. “Every American Negro, therefore, risks having the gates of paranoia close on him, in a society that is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down — that has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day — it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury. One can very quickly case to attempt this distinction, and, what is worse, one usually ceases to attempt it without realizing that one has done so.”

But his conclusion is to exact vast penance from white people. “[T]heir time was up. They had their chance, man, and they goofed!”

This should not surprise us. Baldwin wrote those words nearly sixty years ago. If he was a soloist, now the whole choir is singing.

Sorry, but white people are here on the planet, trying to make their way through life just like you. Like siblings, we’re all gonna have to put up with each other.

And where does that leave you, dear book-lover?

Can I offer you a pan of brownies instead? I’ve made a lot of overkill brownies, but I think Flawless Milky Way Brownies may forever hold my second runner-up spot. (Nothing can top a basic brownie studded with chocolate chips, and for sure, nothing beats a BYU Mint Brownie.)

In fact, these are so good, I’m going to feel sad and empty next time I eat a Milky Way bar.