B ecause Toni Cade Bambara'sThose Bones Are Not My Child is based upon the Atlanta child murders of the late 1970s and early '80s, her novel is a curious blend of fiction and nonfiction—what she identifies, in an interview for the American Audio Prose Library in 1982, as "the contradictory pull of the documentary impulse and the fictional impulse." The product of twelve years of research, Bambara's novel focuses on the political and social climate of those decades. But the novel is not merely documentary, for "The City Too Busy To Hate" is richly rendered as an Atlanta intimate to the author. With Bambara's insights as a member of its African American community at the time, the novel becomes an exploration of the emotions of that community. Through Bambara's focus on the struggles of a fictive black family, the Spencers, devastated by the abduction...