When All Hell Breaks Loose
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Spencer, Camika
Villard/Random House. 256p.
ISBN: 0-375-50340-4. $20

This is a novel about relationships among black twentysomethings, their friends, lovers, and tangled family relationships from the perspective of Gregory Alston. When he asks his girlfriend Adrian Jenkins to marry him, everything seems to fall apart. His mother Louise, who abandoned the family nearly twenty years ago when Greg was young, returns when she learns he has become a successful computer consultant. She tries to rekindle her relationship with Greg’s father and sister. Simultaneously, Greg's relationship with Adrian deteriorates when her maid of honor, Carla, arrives in town. Adrian isn’t happy when Carla begins to date Greg's best friend Tim, and Greg can't understand why she’s upset. One of the climactic moments of the novel is Greg’s discovery of Adrian's sexual orientation. This is a rather ordinary first attempt by Spencer, who first published the book herself.

A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America
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Steele, Shelby
HarperPerennial. 208p.
ISBN: 0-06-093104-3. $14

According to acclaimed writer Steele, the first betrayal of black freedom is segregation. The second? Sixties liberalism. He believes the century was mostly about the American society trying to redeem itself from the guilt and shame rather than developing true equality between the races. Steele, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, addresses the familiar topics of affirmative action, diversity, multiculturalism, victimization, and what he deems the atavistic powers of race, ethnicity, and gender—the original causes of oppression. He points out that affirmative action, set-asides, group preferences, and welfare payments are products of white assumptions of black inferiority. But blacks that rely on their own initiative have managed to excel in music, sports, and literature. Steele's solution to problems such as inner-city joblessness and high crime rates is devotion among blacks to personal accountability, hard work, delayed gratification, and other forms of individual effort, however, he doesn’t show how to implement these goals. While he speaks strongly and clearly in convincing fashion, Steele needs to back up his arguments with research statistics and facts to get the attention that would help change public policy.

Please Please Please
Swindle, Renee
Dial. July. 288p.
ISBN: 0-385-31863-4. $23.95
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This debut novel is about love, love, love—though it is love laced with pain and disappointment. "Babysister" has a weakness for "black men in boots" and sets a trap for Darren Wilson who is a UCLA-trained architect. Darren is a good catch—he owns an upscale condominium and drives a BMW. Though Darren is her best friend’s boyfriend and she has a boyfriend herself, Babysister devises her plan to get him. She believes "Lying [is] much easier than¼ the truth" and does embark on a roller-coaster romance with Darren. Though her story isn’t particularly gripping, there are enough twists and turns, break-up and make-up shenanigans, and insight into why men do the things they do so that Swindle gets to pass go.

Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad

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Tobin, Jacqueline L. and Raymond G. Dobard
Doubleday. 208p.
ISBN: 0-38549-767-9. $14

Based on what well-known quilter Ozella McDaniel Williams told her, Tobin, shares the meaning of codes sewn into quilts that helped slaves plan and execute their flights to freedom. The stories previously written about the Underground Railroad are many, and much is known about the network of cooperating folks that helped fleeing slaves on their way toward the north. However, very little is known of the secrets encoded into quilts that held travel instructions for runaways. For example, we learn "There are five square knots on the quilt every two inches apart. They escaped on the fifth knot on the tenth pattern and went to Ontario, Canada. The monkey wrench turns the wagon wheel toward Canada on a bear's paw trail to the crossroads…" (If a monkey wrench quilt is hung on a fence, the escaping slaves should prepare to go north by wagon and knots often acted as a topographical map of the surrounding area.) Tobin and Dobard are able to link Ozella’s "secrets" with other cultural artifacts such as slave narratives, folk songs and spirituals, as well as children’s stories to create a "history of the Underground Railroad."