The ascendancy of Alice Walker from sharecropper's daughter to literary star is traced by Evelyn C. White in Alice Walker: A Life (W.W. Norton / Penguin $44). Ms Magazine founder Gloria Steinem, plus Color Purple cohorts Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey make appearances, but this is not a tell-all bio for the paperback newsstands. White defends Walker against all her critics in her celebration of the struggle of the first black woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for The Color Purple, made into a movie by Steven Spielberg. Sexual politics, racial friction and misplaced violence have percolated through Alice Walker's work and life, ever since her fiction and poetry emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and White does an admirable job tracing the foundations of Walker's fiction. For a female black to hold firm to her resolve to place art above the dictates of political correctness or family has taken courage. The egoism of the artist, who must pursue her calling at all costs, is a theme that will doubtless be examined more deeply in future biographies. Although Evelyn White is an unmitigated supporter of her subject, her work will serve as the basis for Alice Walker scholarship for many years to come. 0-393-05891-3

[BCBW 2005]