Cose, a contributing editor and columnist at Newsweek
and author of the critically acclaimed The Rage of the Privileged Class, was ordered out of a San Francisco restaurant because the maître d' claimed he was a "troublemaker." Drawing from his own experience (much of it, thankfully, much less hateful), as well as that of men he interviewed, Cose in nice prose details the myriad experiences of black men, among them Henry Louis Gates at Harvard University; Antwan Allen, a Harlem teenager who rejects what "being black" means on the street; Useni Eugene Perkins, poet and author of Home is a Dirty Secret; and Loquillo, who died of a heroin overdose at the age of 45. Spinning these stories, Cose begins to map the complex social, emotional and political fabric in which African-American men such as Tiger Woods and Colin Powell are lionized or like Willie Horton, scorned and feared. He presents an impressive array of statistics—"twenty-eight percent of all black males... eventually will end up in jail"; a Harvard study that showed "black students were nearly three times as likely as whites to be labeled 'retarded' "—which are used not simply to prove racism but to explore the underlying cultural and racial contradictions that produce it. Examining a wide range of cultural artifacts, from William Foote Whyte's classic 1943 Street Corner Society
to the 1999 movie Whiteboys, and never avoiding hard questions such as black-on-black crime or interracial sex, Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now. A six-city author tour should draw Cose's regular Newsweek
readers and move copies of the book. Agent, Michael Congdon. (Jan.)
