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 Afro-American studies at Princeton and author of the widely praised book Race Matters is reasonable and judicious in everything he writes, but his prose is largely inaccessible to the uninitiated. Many of Reed's nonfiction pieces [in Airing Dirty Laundry] sound like irascible bar-stool musings whose topics keep getting derailed by one or another of the author's obsessions. West never really leaves behind the circumlocutions and constraints of his academic training; Reed, best known for his nine novels, operates entirely free of intellectual rigor.

Keeping Faith is West's fourth collection of 1993 (in addition to Race Matters, he's also published Volumes One and Two of Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism). While the essays in Keeping Faith have less obvious interest for the general public than those on racial politics in Race Matters,” there's no reason why lemma of the black intellectual, Georg Lukacs' Marxism or the Critical Legal Studies movement shouldn't be opened up to thoughtful readers who haven't done postgraduate work in the fields. Instead, accumulations of names and theoretical tags do the work of unpacked argument or plain definition, for example: “To put it crudely, Lukacs replaced the prevailing forms of positivistic scientism with a Hegelian form of scientism in the Marxist tradition.”

It isn't trivial to wish that West were cruder—that he used more of what he calls “Anglo-American commonsense lingo”—because the mission of this book, and perhaps of his other books as well, is to place scholarship in the service of West's watchword, the “prophetic.”

“To take seriously one's vocation as an intellectual,” he writes, “is to justify in moral and political terms why one pursues a rather privileged life of the mind in a world that seems to require forms of more direct and urgent action.” That imperative genuinely haunts West; it accounts for his earnestness, decency and sanity.

But Keeping Faith doesn't meet the promise of its subtitle: Instead of using philosophy to analyze race, it makes philosophical inquiry an impenetrable affair, crammed with casual allusion, and then, in essay after essay, breaks into the clear at the end with the same appeal for a marriage of criticism and insurgency.

“Jameson's works are therefore too theoretical,” West concludes an essay on the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. “His welcome call for a political her-meneutics is too far removed from the heat of political battles.”

The critical legal theorists, the Foucaultians, Richard Rorty, black literary critics, everyone comes up under the same charge: They've neglected the prophetic task; in a sense they've failed to justify their vocation. Intellectuals need to turn themselves into “critical organic catalysts,” a formula by which I think West simply means the best of everything: Nietzsche and Marx and Dewey, Africa and Europe, philosophy and revolt, the academy and the church and the public square.

We do need the best of everything, and we also need Cornel West to remind us of that. But this latest book shows how much easier it is to propose the marriage than make it.

“The discussion of race in this country,” says Ishmael Reed, “never seems to rise above the tabloid level, even among academics.” At times it even sinks to the sub-tabloid. Reed's defense of Clarence Thomas, who keeps popping up in Airing Dirty Laundry, rivals Thomas' own: “[He] was treated by feminists in the manner that the Klan has traditionally treated black men—denying them due process.”

Feminists black and white (“the greatest threat to black male well-being since the Klan”) come in for a lot of airing. So do National Public Radio, Terry Gross (the host of NPR's “Fresh Air”) in particular, the New York Times, CNN, NBC and even Cornel West.

The attacks are formless and repetitive and sometimes flatly wrong. West is lumped with writers “who see the friction between blacks and Jews as coming exclusively from the black side.” Read “On Black-Jewish Relations” in Race Matters. It's as balanced as everything else West has written.

“It simply amazes me,” says Reed, “how few feminists criticize men from their own ethnic group, making black men take the rap for all men.” He could at least have mentioned Bob Packwood, if only as the exception that proves the rule.

The theme of this book is the bum rap on black men—on among others, Clarence Thomas, Mike Tyson and Ishmael Reed. What Reed calls the “black pathology industry” is an work everywhere he turns, even on NPR's frequencies, while “a far more lethal white under class” is ignored.

The accusation probably contains a fair part of the truth. But it's the essayist's job to think, not catalog, and without serious reflection or research, without the zest and invention of Reed's fiction, the accusation gets dreary over the course of a whole book of mainly first drafts.

The saving grace of Airing Dirty Laundry is that Reed is not an ideologue with a totalizing system. He shoots his targets, but from time to time his other interests and pleasures manage to appear.

There is a good piece on Ambrose Bierce's Civil War stories, another on the lowlife novels of Chester Himes, another on Zora Neale Hurston's 1936 book on voodoo. (Reed likes Hurston in spite of “the ideological grand standing of some of her contemporary fans, out to get even with the entire male species.”)

Two rambling essays written in 1978—one on the Ali-Spinks fight in New Orleans, one on “Naropa” Buddhist poetry in Colorado—convey the atmosphere of hype and flagging spirit in two vastly different but completely American scenes. And the volume's last piece has Reed in search of his roots—his white, Irish roots.

“There's no such thing as Black America or White America, two nations, two separate bloodlines,” he writes. “America is a land of distant cousins.”

Funny, moving, this essay leaves you surprised and disappointed, as if after an evening on harangue the man on the next bar stool had suddenly told good story just as they we closing up.