Nothing Personal pretends to be a ruthless indictment of contemporary America, but the people likely to buy this extravagant volume are the subscribers to fashion magazines, while the moralistic authors of the work are themselves pretty fashionable, affluent, and chic….

Baldwin's attacks are significant less for their familiar content than for the conditioned response they are expected to provoke in the reader—and, especially, for the format in which they appear. But lending himself to such an enterprise, Baldwin reveals that he is now part and parcel of the very things he is criticizing….

James Baldwin's rage is here inspired largely by opportunism, but while the photographer [Richard Avedon] is taking advantage of the times, the writer is letting the times take advantage of him. Once direct and biting in his criticism of American life, Mr. Baldwin has repeated his revolt so often that it has now become a reflex mannerism that curls his fingers around his pen and squeezes out empty rhetoric. In Nothing Personal, certainly, Baldwin has either adapted his ideas to the intellectual chic of the women's magazines, or he is putting his readers on….

The author of Notes of a Native Son was a highly aware and complicated individual; the author of Nothing Personal, and the rest of his recent writings, is merely a self-constituted Symbol, bucking hard for the rank of Legend. (p. 10)