SOURCE: “The Question is Race,” in Chicago Tribune Books, December 12, 1993, p. 4.

In the following excerpt, Packer offers a tempered assessment of Keeping Faith, citing shortcomings in West's inaccessible scholarly allusions and indefinite promptings for change.

Taken together, these two essay collections point up how difficult it is for writers to act as true “public intellectuals”—to bring their talent and discipline to bear on ideas that matter to general readers in a shared culture. James Baldwin did it; Irving Howe did it. But as journalism grows ever crasser, academic criticism ever more specialized and inward and the public less and less likely to read books, the chances of those kinds of careers emerging and enduring in the future seem dim.

Cornel West and Ishmael Reed approach the task in almost antithetical ways: All they really have in common is their concern with race. West, professor of philosophy and...