In the Spirit

Taylor, the editor-in-chief of Essence , mixes personal anecdotes, black pride and an upbeat spirituality in these brief essays, many of them reprinted from her magazine. Though the wisdom she dispenses is hardly original, her direct style and warmth should reach her target audience of African American women. ``We'll never feel content if our happiness depends on someone else's behavior,'' Taylor writes, noting that she has learned to measure success not by wealth but through ``happiness, personal satisfaction and being of service to others.'' Her most powerful essays are the most self-revealing: in one clearly painful recollection, she concludes that her father's furious reaction to her surreptitious meeting with a young man humiliated her but may ultimately have saved her. ``What I felt was a shameful experience that put a damper on my sexuality actually prevented me from becoming pregnant as a teenager.'' Although Taylor regularly invokes a Christian God, that God is nondenominational and her exhortations are not to doctrine but to a more personal faith. First serial to Essence; author tour. (Nov.)