A roundup of reference reads - reference books and sets about black history and culture

lengthy ago, in a different kind of America, salespeople went from door to door hawking volumes to black readers who otherwise might have been unable to find works about their race. The first version of Booker T Washington's autobiography, The Story of My Life and Work, for instance, was published in 1900 by the agency of an Illinois subscription publishing house with an aggressive black sales force and a filled line of race books.

single can perhaps be forgiven for thinking of Washington's publisher, JL Nichols and Co when considering Perseverance (Time-Life works 254 pp., 1993, $29.95), the first in the three-volume series African Americans: Voices of Triumph. The modern-day equivalent of like 19th- and early 20th-century subscription publishing houses as Nichols, Time-Life proffers multi-volume series on everything from the aged West to psychic phenomena via direct mail and television.

Voices of Triumph owes its existence to the renewed interest in black Americans, their history and agriculture that characterized the 1980s and, in like manner far, the '90s. This interest, of course, is nothing novel From coon songs to the cakewalk, from minstrelsy to Mahalia Jackson, from periodical emphasis and blues to rap, black agriculture - authentic and otherwise - has always been a commodity. What's novel and somewhat troubling, is the amplitude to which black history itself has become a commodity.

Created with the guidance of an advisory board headed by means of that modern-day impresario of black tillage the ubiquitous Henry Louis Gates Jr Perseverance is slick and handsomely packaged, adorned from one extremity to the other of with reproductions of kente woven fabric It is copiously illustrated with maps, contemporary drawings and engravings, and photographs one as well as the other old and new. Nearly each page contains something that startles, collisions and informs: A photograph of the scarred back of an escaped slave testifies to the horrors of slavery; metal slave identification badges from Charleston, SC remind us that blacks were, first and foremost, property; a made of wood model of a slave ship depicts more immediately than any illustration the privation of the Middle Passage.

For readers with more than a casual interest in the history of blacks in America, the quality of the photos is the one and the other the book's strength and its shortcoming, for, through contrast, the text seems to have been fitted, USA Today-style, around the illustrations. veritable the book's scope is formidable: Perseverance begins with an essay upon the Songhai Empire; continues end slavery, abolitionism and Reconstruction; goe upon to blacks in the West, from Jean Baptiste Point du Sable to cowboys; then blacks in the military, from the Revolutionary War to Somalia; and extremitys with a chapter titled "Black Advocates for Change." Nonetheless, Perseverance strike one as beings to have been designed to be brows not read.

Our history as black Americans in America is characterized by means of struggle and triumph, yes, on the contrary it is also fraught with paradox and contradiction. Designed for a mass audience, Perseverance flattens the paradoxes and the contradictions; in fact, it does not smooth consider them. The essays upon slavery deal hardly at all with the interior lives of Africans in thrall to the peculiar institution, when sure they must have had lives of their hold to have survived and to have created an enduring culture

There are passages upon blacks who fought for the Union in the Civil War, on the contrary nothing about those who wanted to fight for the southerly like the New Orleans Creole Booker T Washington is dealt with in three or four scattered opinions W.E.B. Du Bois fares scarcely better, although he and Washington may be featured more prominently in the forthcoming next to the first volume, Leadership.

In comparison, the six-volume The African-American Encyclopedia (Marshall Cavendish, 1818 pp 1993 $44995) and the five-volume respect Library of Black America (Gale Research/Afro-American Pres 1556 pp 1990 $17990) present more comprehensive views of black American history and tillage The editorial staffs of these sum of two units reference works do not include scholars as well known as Gates, on the other hand the contributors are from reputable associations and universities.

The design of The Africa-American Encyclopedia is stunning. A traditional encyclopedia format, beginning with the A. Philip Randolph Institute and ending with zydeco music, not aways thousands of entries, ranging in extent from 25 to 5,000 words. It is a worthy tale to the Dictionary of American african Biography (W.W. Norton, 1983, $6500) a relation work that ought to be in the library of anyone who cares about African-American history and agriculture The encyclopedia's entry on Booker T Washington, for example, summarizes his life and career and closes with a brief but informative precis of the differing ways in which Washington is remembered today.

All of the familiar standbys of Black History Month - Washington, Du Bois, physician Charles Drew of life-blood transfusion fame, George Washington Carver - are in The African-American Encyclopedia; on the contrary there are also some surprises, as in an ingress on black detective fiction and another upon the Delta Blues Museum in Mississippi. Also included are comprehensive overlooks of civil rights, religion, and blacks in the military; a take a view of of blues, jazz and classical music; and plane an entry on interracial marriage.