Breaking Barriers: A Memoir.

Carl Rowan, best known now as a syndicated columnist and radio and television commentator, takes the title of his autobiography from the numerous times he was the "first black" in an important position. He sums up his more than three score life accurately when he writes: "I have been, in my early days, Richard Wright's Black Boy; in my late teens a Booker T. Washington coming Up From Slavery and in my 30s and 40s a black Horatio Alger in the minds of some whites."

As a child, Rowan says he patched his shoes with linoleum squares and suffered "hunger colics." Yet, after attending Hampton College he went on to become one of the first black officers in the U.S. Navy and one of the first black reporters at The Minneapolis Tribune; the then-highest-ranking black to ever serve in the State Department; ambassador to Finaland; and U.S. Information Agency director.

By and large, this memoir is an engrossing account of a journey through several American landscapes. Rowan also provides analyses of presidents, such as Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson. If there is a weakness in the accounts, it is that too often Rowan reflects only on his involvement in an issue and not the larger consequences of the event.

Rowan ends with a chapter entitled, "A New Vision for America." There he compares America's progress in dealing with democracy and race to the ascent of a train on a hill. "Reagan put the brakes on halfway up America's hill." he writes. "Bush doesn't know how to take the brakes off."