Proceedings of the Thirteenth North American Prairie Conference Book

I love everything Jones/Baraka wrote in his younger days. He was the most intense, brilliant, fearless of the black writers of the '60s. His plays -- "The Toilet," "J-E-L-L-O," "Slave Ship" -- were eviscerating, and his essays -- "Home" --had a skewering depth that nobody else reached. But like the rest of us, he got older, and though he didn't exactly lose his edge, by the time of the autobio (1984) he'd lost the cohesion that made his writing unique. I can read 3 or 4 pages of this at a time, but it's exhausting without being enlightening. I'm hoping that if I give it to a thrift shop, somebody in these very white hills will pick it up, but I doubt that.