Long Distance Life

In intense, luminous prose, Golden ( A Woman's Place ) deftly blends the experiences of one black family into the tapestry of 20th-century black history in America. Having grown up up in poverty as the daughter of a North Carolina sharecropper, Naomi Reeves moves to Washington, D.C., in 1926; there she begins a more promising life and eventually acquires a boarding house. Spunky, intuitive and proud, Naomi weds a teacher who cares deeply about black advancement and, following his death, rears their daughter, Esther. After dropping out of college, Esther becomes involved with a married man and bears his child. She later works for civil rights in the strife-torn South. Esther's older son, Logan, reflects her hard-won pride and courage; Nathaniel, her other boy, turns to drug dealing. Naomi's words are charged with the determination, vigor and stoicism that fueled the struggle for black equality. (Oct.)