NONFICTION - Jan. 14, 1996

SPEAK MY NAME: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream edited by Don Belton. (Beacon Press: $24; 288 pp.) As editor Don Belton, author and former Newsweek reporter, notes, black men today occupy a “. . . narrow mainstream representation in which it seems they can only be super-athletes, super-entertainers, or super-criminals.” “Speak My Name” goes a long way toward humanizing and enlarging that spectrum. The stories, essays and mini-memoirs compiled here vary in quality from ordinary to brilliant. The writers vary as well: Familiar names like Walter Mosley and John Edgar Wideman along with less familiar ones. Robin D. G. Kelley’s depiction of being a “Nice Negro” is funny and incisive, and Don Belton’s painful narrative about his troubled nephew is reason enough to buy the book.

In many ways, “Speak My Name” does not take risks. Most of the writing is intelligent, generous and restrained. In his introduction, Belton compares the book’s structure to “a jazz compositional model of theme and variation.” If that is the case, then all that thoughtful piano and heartbreaking sax could have used a raucous, brassy horn to give everyone a hard time. Still, “Speak My Name” is an honest, important book.