White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas: Coming of Age Black in White America

Mabry, a 27-year-old foreign correspondent for Newsweek, joins the stream of black male memoirists with this diffuse, partly affecting tale of his path from the ghetto to a sometimes precarious place in the white mainstream. It is by now a familiar story, so the challenge is in the telling. Mabry writes fluidly enough about his isolated youth near Trenton, N.J.: ``My grandmother and my encyclopedias were my best friends.'' He cites the help of his self-sacrificing yet self-defeating mother, as well as government aid, as the source of his success. Most of this book, however, concerns Mabry's rewarding but rocky times as a scholarship prep-school student at Lawrenceville (N.J.) and as an undergraduate at Stanford, plus his entree into France and a budding career at Newsweek. Some of his anecdotes are illuminating; for example, his tale of rejection by Stanford blacks and his criticism of ``the galloping paranoia'' against political correctness. However, as he closes his memoir with a scene of reconciliation with his long-estranged father and his struggling brother, it seems Mabry might have waited a bit longer to sort it all into perspective. (Aug.)