A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America.

• Author: Williams, Juan

David Shipler has a sensitive ear, and he has found and ably presented a wide range of bright and compelling people talking about how race affects their lives. But too often there seems to be no point to the succession of stories and confessions in this book. With few exceptions, our narrator removes any critical judgment from his telling of their tales. The result is that Shipler comes across less as a guiding intelligence through his concatenation of voices than as an accidental tourist or a foreign correspondent, sending letters back home from a strange land.

In fact, Shipler was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and won the Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, Arab and Few: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. The new book has the feel of a writer who has brought the foreign correspondent's detached perspective back home and applied it to the racial divide. That may be a good idea in principle. But the Middle East book was written for an audience of Americans who don't know the reality of the day-to-day Arab-Israeli struggle, while this book on race relations is being presented to people who have lived through O.J., Willie Horton, and Proposition 209.

The result is a loose mix of perspectives that does not include the best challenges to affirmative action or even to controversial political figures like Washington D.C.'s mayor, Marion Barry. Instead, supporters of such programs or people get a free pass to tell their side of the story. Barry's story, for example, comes across in these pages as a biblical resurrection: a black man victimized by drugs and forced to jail before family being reborn. There is no analysis of his corrupt hold on power in the city, or of the damage he did to the nationwide struggle for black political power. Similarly, there are no voices speaking out about the virtues of racial integration and assimilation, despite their value to many white ethnic immigrants as well as most blacks.

When Shipler does inject his voice, in the introduction to the book and the concluding chapter, he offers the simple but profound insight that black and white Americans live as strangers. It is not because they don't know each other, Shipler contends, but because their minds are filled with myths about each other. For...