The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma.

• Author: Muwakkil, Salim

By Alex Kotlowitz Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 317 pages. $24.95.

It's tempting to dismiss the writer Alex Kotlowitz as a kind of racial dilettante, darting in and out of black folks' lives with faux familiarity, exploiting their miseries and their trust just to sell another story and be regarded as an "expert." The former Wall Street Journal writer's first book, There Are No Children Here, was a closely observed, almost anthropological account of lives in Chicago's notorious public housing projects. It focused on two boys, Pharoah and Lafeyette. The volume won a host of awards, and Oprah Winfrey's production company adapted it into a made-for-television movie. But it also provoked some criticism that Kotlowitz had produced yet another paternalistic narrative.

His new book registers that criticism by focusing again on racial issues. But it also refutes that criticism, since it reveals that Kotlowitz has always been interested in more than just providing guided tours through "Bronzeville." Discerning readers of his first book already knew that, but any white author of black subjects has an odious tradition to live down.

With a narrative style that embraces rather than confronts, Kotlowitz is trying to demystify difference. His stories point to human commonalities, and he avoids the condescending voice typical of such chronicles; his gaze beholds but never de means. It's likely that more Americans became acquainted with the spirit-numbing realities of public housing through Kotlowitz's stories about Lafeyette and Pharoah than they did through any number of speeches and demonstrations.

His latest book provides readers with a more subtle understanding of our racial quandary. With focused intensity, Kotlowitz examines the 1991 drowning of a black teenager named Eric McGinnis in a racially divided region of southwestern Michigan.

Although he tries to solve the mystery of the sixteen-year-old boy's death, he is more interested in figuring out why opinions about the death were so racially coded--most blacks believed he was murdered, whites assumed he just drowned accidentally.

Kotlowitz's reporting is both meticulous and empathetic. It gives us a glimpse of our bifurcated national psyche.

The author was still working for the Wall Street Journal when he came upon the "Twin Cities" of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. The towns, on the eastern bank of Lake Michigan, are separated by the St. Joseph River. Benton Harbor is predominantly black and poor, while...