cover image Face-To-Face: Blacks in America: White Perceptions

Face-To-Face: Blacks in America: White Perceptions

Rose L. H. Finkenstaedt. William Morrow & Company, $28 (432pp) ISBN 978-0-688-12383-3

Finkenstaedt, a former college teacher in the U.S. who now lives in Paris, here offers a dated, academic survey of ``the white and black trends in contemporary culture.'' She first assays the contours of segregation (economic, political and social) and its effect on black poverty, then describes the black counterstrategies of assimilation and nationalism, from Frederick Douglass to the Black Panthers. Perhaps most useful are Finkenstaedt's readings of stereotypes of blacks in American literature from Faulkner to Mailer. Her final section on black cultural affirmation surveys mostly novelists, from James Weldon Johnson to Ishmael Reed, and explains how their work explores and extends black identity. However, her study is far from comprehensive or current, ignoring, for example, recent books by scholars Andrew Hacker and William Julius Wilson, as well as the controversies concerning the Nation of Islam and its leader, Louis Farrakhan. (May)