Children of the Dream: The Psychology of Black Success.

Magazine editor Audrey Edwards and psychologist Craig Polite take on a monumental challenge in their book, Children Of The Dream: The Psychology Of Black Success. Their goal is to bring into prespective the experiences of the baby boomers (the book targets those born between 1946 and 1964), who comprise the first generation of African-Americans to fits--and often brutal penalties--of integration in a society defined by a pathology of race discrimination.

A stated goal opf the book is to analyze black success strategies in the American workplace, but it also does a good job of examining issues, such as color consciousness among blacks, with implications that reach far beyond the boundaries of job and career.

If the book has a weakness, it's that the authors sometimes seem too close to the people and issues profiled in the book. This blunts, to a degree, some of the clinical objectivity of the author's psychoanalytic conclusions. This is probably because: 1) Both Edwards and Polite are part of the generation defined by the book and 2) both have dealt with many of the subjects of Children of the Dream in their professional lives--she as editor-at-large for Essence magazine and a former executive editor of BLACK ENTERPRISE, he as a psychoanalyst specializing in the problems of the black middle class. However, these factors also make them uniquely qualified to provide an intimate and often moving assessment of the "integration generation."