ANOTHER DAY AT THE FRONT: Dispatches from the Race War

Despite the rabble-rousing subtitle, remarkable novelist and critic Reed offers far more than the erudite, colloquial confrontationalism with which he is often pigeon-holed. Essays sometimes focus on the virtues of crucial cultural figures, like Quincy Troupe, or contest divisive works by black intellectuals, such as Nigger. But the book, communicative and direct, remains at every turn acerbically fixed on peeling back everything that continues, extends or disguises the various forms of white-on-black violence, which remains, for the insightful and uncompromising Reed, a fundamental fact of the black experience in the United States. (Jan. 1)