SOURCE: A review of Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, in African American Review, Vol. 33, Spring, 1999, pp. 170-72.

In the following review, Deck contends that Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions “confirms what we already know about Bambara’s artistry and informs us on personal and political matters that allow us to better understand what she saw as her mission.”

The posthumous publication of Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions fills the void I felt open up in my intellectual endeavors when I learned of Toni Cade Bambara's death in 1995. Bambara was part of a major late-twentieth-century renaissance of African American women fiction writers which includes Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, ntozake shange, and Paule Marshall. Though she had not published a book in the fourteen years prior to her death (her research, teaching, and writing had turned to African American film and independent black film makers), a re-reading of...