bookrevs


 
 

Book Reviews 199 

in the postmodern ideological critique”). 
Travis notes the emergence of the “resis­
tant” reader, who engages with texts 
rather than immersing herself in them. 
Reading in the postmodern age has be­
come an ironic act. “Beloved and Middle 
Passage: Race, Narrative, and the Critic’s 
Essentialism” contrasts novels by Toni 
Morrison and Charles Johnson. Most in­
teresting here is the explanation of how 
Morrison builds on and overturns the 
conventions of the traditional slave nar­
rative, creating a genuine sense of the 
“other” that readers can neither wholly 
identify with nor wholly reject. Johnson, 
on the other hand, attempts to transcend 
race and in doing so negates the existence 
of the “other.” Both chapters are marred, 
in my view, by an undercurrent of anx­
ious moralizing not uncharacteristic of 
academic writing today. 

The chapter “Reading (in) Cyberspace: 
Cybernetic Aesthetics, Hypertext, and the 
Virtual Public Space” will be more acces­
sible to most librarians. There is less 
theory and more straightforward descrip­
tion of the experience of reading 
hypertext narratives. How many of us 
have actually read any of these? Travis 
gamely traversed William Gibson’s 
Neuromancer, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, 
Carolyn Guyer ’s Quibbling, and Stuart 
Moulthorp’s Victory Garden. Despite her 
predisposition in favor of interactivity 
and agency in a hypertext environment, 
she found these books somewhat disap­
pointing. There was not enough surprise 
or adventure. They created a dreamy 
world without resolution and were in 
danger of “fetishizing” form. Some of 
these early hypertext fictions, curiously 
enough, originated as commentaries or 
recreations of postmodernist novels by 
writers such as Thomas Pynchon. 

The final chapter, “Cultural Production 
and the Teaching of Reading,” is very ten­
tative. Here Travis espouses the 
“pedagogic turn evident in recent liter­
ary theory and criticism.” She is seeking 
ways to reform the traditional classroom 
hierarchy, in which the teacher is the “au­
thor” and students are passive “readers.” 

She also wants to create a truly 
multicultural educational experience. Al­
though she admits, with characteristic 
candor, that computers in the classroom 
have mostly proved a failure, she projects 
a vision of a pedagogy of multicultural 
“performance” through computer net­
works. Even this chapter, thankfully, has 
patches of interesting material, such as the 
comparison of college campuses to shop­
ping malls and theme parks. 

Clearly, this is not an essential book for 
librarians to read. However, there is a re­
curring theme that I found relevant. Ev­
ery profound change in publishing or 
readership has given rise to a reaction of 
fear. Too many readers with too much 
freedom, it is feared, will lead to excess, 
promiscuity, and anarchy in reading. 
Worse, people will spend too much time 
in an imaginary world. They will lose 
touch with reality and be unable to dis­
tinguish truth from falsehood. These 
same fears arose with each expansion of 
printing, literacy, mass media, film, tele­
vision, and now the Internet. Perhaps we 
should step back and reflect historically 
on our present concerns about readers (es­
pecially students) surfing on the Web, our 
worry about information overload, super­
ficiality, and loss of standards. I suspect 
we would be less afraid.—Jean Alexander, 
Carnegie Mellon University. 

Untold Stories: Civil Liberties, Libraries, and 
Black Librarianship. Ed. John Mark 
Tucker. Champaign, Ill.: University of 
Illinois Graduate School of Library and 
Information Science, 1998. 210p. $27 
(ISBN 0-87845-104-8). LC 98-196951. 

Untold Stories is a major contribution to 
the study of African-American librarian-
ship and the struggle to provide library 
and information services to African-
American communities. The book is the 
result of a Library History Round Table 
program presented at the 1994 ALA Con­
ference in Miami Beach, Florida. The es­
says—by fifteen different writers, some 
black and some white—describe nearly 
two hundred years of effort; chronicling 
the struggle for liberty and literacy for 



200 College & Research Libraries 

African Americans, from the Sunday 
school reading societies for black females 
in New York City in 1799 to current ef­
forts to provide adequate library services 
to minority communities in urban centers 
and rural areas. The book reminds us that 
the days of segregated state library asso­
ciations and segregated “black branches” 
of public library systems are not as far 
back in our history as we would like to 
believe. 

Several essays document the heroic 
efforts of individuals such as E.J. Josey, 
Virginia Lacy Jones, Thomas F. Blue, Clara 
Stanton Jones, Edward Christopher Will­
iams, and many others to address ineq­
uities within the profession, to break 
down the artificial barriers erected by 
some of our colleagues, and to pave the 
way for future generations. They also re­
mind us of the sorry record the ALA and 
its leadership have sometimes left in the 
drive for racial equality in the library 
world. We are reminded that as late as 
1956, African-Americans attending ALA 
conferences could not stay in the same 
hotels as other conferees or eat in the same 
dinning facilities, even when they were 
ALA-sponsored events. It is incompre­
hensible today to think that equal access 
to public facilities at ALA conferences 

Index to advertisers 
Archival Products 192 
BIOSIS 131 
Blackwell’s Book Srvcs 173 
CHOICE 164 
Congressional Information cover 3

 Service 
EBSCO cover 4 
Elsevier Science 202 
Fitzroy-Dearborn 179 
G.K. Hall 201 
Greenwood Publishing 104 
Haworth Press 143 
Library Technologies 120 
OCLC 103 
Primary Source Media 107 
Roper Center 152 
Sage Publications cover 4 

March 1999 

could have been an issue some librarians 
opposed. 

On the other hand, another essay docu­
ments efforts of some members of the 
ALA to improve access to library re­
sources and services for African-Ameri­
cans. In 1921, the New York Public 
Library’s Ernestine Rose was appointed 
chair of a Work with Negroes Round 
Table for which she conducted surveys 
to document the adequacy of library ser­
vices for African- Americans and through 
which she proposed recommendations 
for improving the conditions she had 
found. In 1930, Louis Shores published a 
survey assessing public library services 
for African-Americans in eighty cities 
with large numbers of African-American 
residents. His findings further docu­
mented the existence of unequal and in­
adequate resources and services, as well 
as an absence of, or rank discrimination 
in, hiring and promotion of African-
American librarians. 

Two highly regarded academic librar­
ians, Edward Holley (white) and Charles 
Churchwell (black) recall their respective 
perceptions of the integration of the li­
brary staff at the University of Houston 
in 1967. Another essay by Casper L. Jor­
dan and Beverly P. Lynch addresses 
ACRL’s efforts in the 1970s to improve the 
administrative and managerial skills of 
African-American library administrators 
by establishing an internship program 
that enabled them to spend up to a year 
working with administrators at leading 
mainstream academic libraries. 

Several case studies are presented to 
illustrate local efforts to improve services 
to African-American and, in the case of 
North York, Canada, Afro-Canadian and 
Caribbean communities. In one instance, 
in Wichita Falls, Texas, we learn that when 
integration involved the absorption of an 
historically black library, the results were 
not exactly what had been anticipated. In 
his essay, Donald Franklin Joyce describes 
how several black librarians have ex­
panded their approach to meeting the 
information needs of African-Americans 
by moving into the field of publishing. 



 

The book ends with a bibliographic 
essay entitled “Civil Rights, Libraries, and 
African American Librarianship, 1954– 
1994.” It highlights the fact that there is still 
a great deal of progress to be made and 
that there are ample research opportuni­
ties for those who wish to document it. 

This is an extraordinary publication 
that should be required reading for ev­
eryone interested in librarianship and in 
libraries as a positive influence in soci­
ety. Untold Stories is a vivid reminder of 
how far we have come, but also from how 
low a position we began. Segregation is 
not as distant in history as many of us 
would like to think; and discrimination, 
with its deleterious effects, has not dis­
appeared from our midst.—Stanton F. 
Biddle, Baruch College, CUNY. 

Book Reviews 201