Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man

All but one originally published in the New Yorker, these profiles work together to create a striking collective biography of the 20th-century African-American male in all his diversity. Figures as different as Harry Belafonte and Colin Powell get equally perceptive treatment, though the essays on writer Albert Murray and literary critic Anatole Broyard (who passed for white) are particularly fine. Henry Louis Gates's pungent introduction bolsters his stature as our preeminent black intellectual, unapologetically immersed in race as a crucial element in American social discourse.