Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience.

• Author: Feldstein, Mark

Like so many other aspiring college journalists in the seventies, I was inspired to become an investigative reporter by the Watergate heroics of The Washington Post. Ten years later, I moved to the capital and was surprised to discovered that the same newspaper which bravely felled a crooked president seemed afraid even to criticize the cocaine-riddled corruption of the city's major, Marion S. Barry, Jr.

What was going on? The Post's coverage of the Barry administration - indeed, of black Washington generally - seemed to vacillated between the obligatory and the enfeebled. Not that I minded, really. I was one of the paper's television rivals, and its neglect only made it that much easier to break local stories. Still, the question nagged: Why had one of the best papers in the country fallen down so badly in its own backyard?

In this autobiographical essay, Jill Nelson offers the most pointed critique yet on racism at The Washington Post. Nelson, an African-American reporter who worked at the paper for four years, delights the reader with a memoir that's raw, acerbic and hilarious; she happily picks at the scabs of race and sex and class that most writers prefer to leave untouched. For Nelson, payback is a bitch, and she pays back - and bitches back - with a vengeance, settling some nasty scores with the establishment organ that seduced her from freelance writing in New York and then abandoned her in the back-stabbing nation's capital.

Nelson gets her licks in good. Ben Bradlee turns out to be "a short, gray, wrinkled gnome." Bradlee utters such inspiring lines as "I want the fashions [section] to be exciting, new, to portray women who dress with style, like my wife." Publisher Don Graham is "a rich kid waiting for his mother to let go of the reins." Other Posties are uncharitably described as "weasel-like" and "mottled, plump, sour-lipped."

But ultimately, Nelson's book is more than just an angry middle finger extended to her former colleagues. It is also a poignant tale of being black and female in a white and male corporate world - "voluntary slavery," she calls it. "I envy the arrogance," she writes of the Post, "their inherent belief in the efficacy of whatever they're doing, the smugness that comes from years of simply being caucasian and, for the really fortunate, having a penis."

A soul sister who revels in the racy, Nelson describes exploits like having sex with a mortician on his embalming table ("I would have burst out laughing...