A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America.

David Shipler has a sensitive ear, and he has found and ably presented a wide range of bright and compelling people talking about how race affects their lives. But too often there seems to be no point to the succession of stories and confessions in this book. With few exceptions, our narrator removes any critical judgment from his telling of their tales. The result is that Shipler comes across less as a guiding intelligence through his concatenation of voices than as an accidental tourist or a foreign correspondent, sending letters back home from a strange land.

In fact, Shipler was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and won the Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, Arab and Few: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. The new book has the feel of a writer who has brought the foreign correspondent's detached perspective back home and applied it to the racial divide. That may be a good idea in principle. But the Middle East book was written for an audience of Americans who don't know the reality of the day-to-day Arab-Israeli struggle, while this book on race relations is being presented to people who have lived through O.J., Willie Horton, and Proposition 209.

The result is a loose mix of perspectives that does not include the best challenges to affirmative action or even to controversial political figures like Washington D.C.'s mayor, Marion Barry. Instead, supporters of such programs or people get a free pass to tell their side of the story. Barry's story, for example, comes across in these pages as a biblical resurrection: a black man victimized by drugs and forced to jail before family being reborn. There is no analysis of his corrupt hold on power in the city, or of the damage he did to the nationwide struggle for black political power. Similarly, there are no voices speaking out about the virtues of racial integration and assimilation, despite their value to many white ethnic immigrants as well as most blacks.

When Shipler does inject his voice, in the introduction to the book and the concluding chapter, he offers the simple but profound insight that black and white Americans live as strangers. It is not because they don't know each other, Shipler contends, but because their minds are filled with myths about each other. For example, white Americans fear physical violence and crime from blacks, despite the fact that most crimes perpetrated by blacks are committed against other blacks. On the other side of the racial divide, Shipler has blacks testify about white brutality, committed by vicious cops and lynch mobs, offered as justification for many blacks' belief that whites are the really violent race.

Having allowed a cast of blacks and whites to explore several areas of mutual misconception, Shipler concludes that whites have the greater responsibility for distorting reality and exacerbating the racial divide. As the majority race, they too often allow themselves to pretend that racial issues don't exist -- thereby forcing the burden of dealing with them onto minorities. "Few white Americans," Shipler writes, "have much grasp of how they are seen by African-Americans because few whites ask the question and if they did most blacks would probably be more polite than honest. We do not converse across the racial line."

Shipler's final insight is that whites need help in opening their eyes to the persistence of racism, and that help has to come from black Americans because blacks are attuned to "the nuances of bias, which must be discerned if we are to move toward racial justice."

In the introduction Shipler claims his book is not about statistics or public policy. "It is about people and the way they think and their images of one another, about what happens when their paths intersect -- It is a journey along the crucial fault line of America' But by the end, with its emphasis on whites mho are blind to the advantage of being white, it seems clear that what Shipler is really offering in these pages is an argument for affirmative action.

Nonetheless, one can disagree with that prescription and still find the book well worth reading. Shipler has done a service simply by showing blacks and whites how seldom they have any idea what is going on in each others' heads.