Our Common Ground: Portraits of Blacks Changing the Face of America. - book reviews

Consisting of text and photographs by Bruce Caines, Our Common Ground (Crown, 1994) is billed as "a stunning photographic tribute to ... people who are changing the face of America by changing the way America views black people." Well, perhaps; but most of the folks profiled in this volume--community activists, actors, actresses, television personalities, an astrophysicist--just seem to be going about their lives and work, giving hardly a thought to what white people think.

This ia a hodgepodge of a book, rife with dubious insights, such as this one: "Environmental studies has long been thought of as strictly for European-Americans, many of whom became interested in the field in the 1960s, when people were communing with nature."

Throughout, the text seems to have been written with a junior high school student in mind, and maybe that is the audience Caines wants to reach. Certainly it's not hard to imagine school librarians ordering the book in a misguided attempt to influence lives where few positive role models are present.

The photographs are stunningly professional enough to have stood by themselves.

David Nicholson is an assistant editor or Washington Post Book World. His last article for American Visions, "Every Picture Tells a Story," appeared in the October/November 1994 issue.

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