SOURCE: “Immoderate Moderate,” in Commentary, Vol. 96, No. 2, August, 1993, pp. 62-4.

In the following review, Puddington offers an unfavorable analysis of Race Matters and West's Leftist perspective.

Cornel West has been acclaimed as one of the most important commentators on race relations in America. He has been the subject of feature profiles in major publications and appears frequently on televised public-affairs programs. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard, has described West as “the preeminent African-American intellectual of our generation”; according to Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, his is “one of the most authentic, brilliant, prophetic, and healing voices in America today.”

Until recently, West’s audience has been limited to specialists in the culture and politics of black America. In Race Matters, however, West, a professor of religion and director of Afro-American Studies at Princeton, is writing for...