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BOOK REVIEWS

DU BOIS SPEAKS FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF W. E. B. DU BOIS. A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life From the Last Decade of its First Century. International Publishers, New York, 448 pages. $10.00.

IN THE PUBLICATION of this richly rewarding and utterly fascinating autobiography on the one-hundredth anniversary of Dr. DuBois's birth, International Publishers has performed an historic service for the people of the United States. 

For this is no ordinary autobiography about an ordinary man. This book is a microcosm of the tortured life and struggles of Negro Americans during three quarters of this century, mirrored in the life and times of a great man, a great thinker, a great doer, a giant and a genius of the twentieth century. 

Like a great artist whose deep understanding and love for the working people harmonize with a master craftsmanship in line and color to produce a great painting that remains fresh and bright with age, Du Bois speaks to us in language that is at once poetry and poetic prose, about his growth and development in the bosom of our people and we understand him clearly.

With a candor, integrity and honesty that befit a people's scientist bent on opening their eyes as well as his own to truth, he lays bare and makes come alive the enormity of the crimes committed against our people in the building of this nation, under the banner of a racist ideology which proclaims the American government's right to conquer the world in the name of democracy. And what is more, he tells us candidly that he sees for us and all the world's people struggling to be free a bright future in mankind's new society, now firmly entrenched on a fourth of the globe and enveloping a third of the population of the earth.  

In reading this absorbing book one thinks immediately of Frederick Douglass, that other giant and genius of the nineteenth century, whose Life and Times continues to startle us with the pertinancy for today, of the creative leadership in thought, word and deed that illuminates his autobiography.

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