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BOOK REVIEW          HAIRSTON

supremacy blinders will not permit reality to shine through his fantasies.  Like the world he represents, he feeds on the juices of his own moral excretions.

And yet somehow the story doesn't hit with the force that is loaded in its theme.  The characters are fascinating but they are two-dimensional and the way they are manipulated by the author under-mines their plausibility.  Despite those flaws, this is still a powerful and well-told story.

Apart from being a writer of feeling, depth, and sensitivity, Ernest Gaines is one of the best craftsmen writing fiction today.  But these stories are compelling not simply because they are skillfully told, but because they evoke in the reader a sense of compassion for his fellow creature, because they enlarge upon our understanding, because they are, first and foremost, entertaining reading.

The world Mr. Gaines writes about is with us still, with all of its anguish, cruelties, and humiliating punishments; and it is a tribute to his art that it derives its substance and strength from those roots of our common experience.  His work glows with humanity and it is filled with the vitality of living experience in all of its varied richness.

Bloodline is soul writing at the level of fine literature.  And if we were really mining our cultural resources, Ernest J. Gaines' work would certainly be on our best-seller list.

Loyle Hairston

THE LESSONS OF SCOTTSBORO

SCOTTSBORO: A TRAGEDY OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH. By Dan T. Carter. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge. 431 pages. $10.00.

THE FACTS ARE THERE, cold and hard.  They reveal exhaustive so-called, conviction, death sentencing, appeal, reversal, and retrial of nine black youth in Scottsboro, Alabama, beginning in the spring of 1931.  Prof. Carter, graduate of the University of South Carolina, now an assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland, has not distorted the facts surrounding the infamous affair.  Nor has he seriously analyzed them as a responsible, objective scientist in the field of history should and would have done.

Because of that the more than 400 pages covering nineteen years, which have come off the Louisiana State University Press entitled Scottsboro: a Tragedy of the American South is not realistic as a picture

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