Choice 评论
The first edition of Page's directory, titled Selected Black American Authors: An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography (CH, Oct '78), included some 430 entries. Now, with the assistance of Jae Roh, he has expanded that work to include African and Caribbean authors and brought the total number of entries to 653. As with the earlier edition, the material that goes to make up each entry (birth and death dates, education, awards, writings, sidelights, and sources) is supplied by the authors or their publishers and is nonevaluative. The book attempts a great deal: it includes both deceased and living writers, and all genres of literary and nonliterary efforts; however, Page and Roh restrict their survey to books published in English. All of the important black poets and novelists, such as James Baldwin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright are included, but the real value of this work is in the inclusion of lesser-known figures like Loren Miller, a California lawyer who wrote a book about the Negro and the Supreme Court, and Ortiz Walton, a teacher who produced a sociological study of Afro-American music. This book is attractive, and is recommended to undergraduate libraries as a source of quick information on a wide spectrum of black authors, but with the caution that critical evaluation must come from other works.-D.C. Dickinson, University of Arizona