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RECENT BOOKS
ERNEST KAISER
(Books reviewed in this number of FREEDOMWAYS have been omitted.)
THE NEGRO IN THE U.S.

Abdul, Raoul (editor). THE MAGIC OF BLACK POETRY. New York: Dodd, Mead. x, 118 pages. $3.95. (Abdul, the Black co-editor with Alan Lomax of 3,000 Years of Black Poetry [1970], has compiled here for young readers a comprehensive collection of poems by black poets from ancient Africa through present day Africa, the Caribbean and the U.S. The 14 sections are beginnings, springtime, love, heroes, places, nonsense, Christmas, singing words, ballads and legends, etc. Both anthologies have unusual, hard-to-find poems.)
Amoda, Moyibi. BLACK POLITICS AND BLACK VISION. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press. $6.50. (A Nigerian scholar looks at the American Black problem and  erroneously finds that the Blacks' primary problem is a crisis of authority amongst themselves.)
Badillo, Herman and Milton Haynes. A BILL OF NO RIGHTS: ATTICA AND THE AMERICAN PRISON SYSTEM. New York, Outerbridge & Lazard: E. P. Dutton. 190 pages. $6.95. (Congressman Badillo was a member of the Citizens Observer Committee at Attica at the time of the massacre of 43 men in Sept. 1971. Another book is William R. Coon's Attica Diary [Stein & Day, 1972, $6.95] about the white author's 15 months there. The report of the McKay Commission on Attica has been published by Bantam Books. New York State Commissioner of Correctional Services Russell G. Oswald's book Attica-My Story [Doubleday] is terrible. It justifies everything that happened at Attica in the face of facts which refute its contentions.)
Bagdikian, Ben H. & Leon Dash. THE SHAME OF PRISONS. New York: Pocket Books. 190 pages. $1.25 (paper). (The Washington Post national report.)
Baker, Jr., Houston A. LONG BLACK SONG: ESSAYS IN BLACK AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 156 pages. (Baker, a young Black professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the editor of Black Literature in America [1971] and Twentieth Century Interpretations of Native Son. Long Black Song has essays on B. T. Washington, Du Bois, Wright, Douglass, and David Walker, folklore, language, culture and literary tradition. Baker's exploration of the writings around these subjects is useful and enlightening. He makes no great claims. He has no strong opinions, dislikes or great insights. He just tries to explain the distinctiveness of Black American folklore, culture and literature. And the writings of Stanley Elkins, the New Critics and others are dethroned in the process. Baker accepts the current denigration of the proletarian literature of the thirties and tries a little too hard to explain Wright's Communism. Wright caught a vision of a better world and then lost it.)
Bambara, Toni Cade. GORILLA, MY LOVE. New York: Random House. x, 177 pages. $5.95. (Black writer Toni Bambara's short stories reveal what is wrong with a lot of black writing today. The stories' naturalism falls into the black stereotypes of constant fighting and much lethal violence. Nothing of real
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