Word: shipler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...forthcoming book by Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist David K. Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (Knopf; $30), reaches similar conclusions. Shipler embarks on a sprawling, impressive tour along the "crucial fault line of America," crafting an absorbing theater piece of characters, from undergraduates at Princeton to probation officers in South Central Los Angeles. In one scene, a white waitress in Alabama jabs at a former school principal, a black man, for having suspended her 20 years earlier. The banter is lighthearted, but Shipler perceives more. "How galling...to feel helpless before a black man in authority...
...Shipler in particular should be commended for tireless and nuanced reportage. But there is a hollowness in each of these books. Sleeper's book will probably provide more ammunition to color-blind conservatives than to the liberals he intends it for, while the exhortations of Coleman and Shipler--that white Americans should look within and take up the cross of racial healing--will appeal mainly to those who already have. That three ambitious, intelligent books should fail to break much new ground suggests, sadly, how difficult thinking and writing about race in an innovative way has become for most Americans...