Originally a four-part series of New Yorker articles, so by no means scholarly or deeply analytic, but a highly readable introduction to its subject. A confident tone of insider information in the New Yorker style, by a Black journalist of Jamaican origin and long-time residence in NYC. Sympathetic presentation of Carl Van Vechten led me on to that writer’s best known work, which I might have avoided owing to its title, controversial even at the time, apparently.