The most dangerous trap we as literary critics can fall into is to ignore the cultural environments that engender the works we study. We read Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, and-based on our modern conceptions of social equality-we label the book as racist. At first glance, Elaine and Harry Mensh's book, Black, White, and "Huckberry Finn": Re-imagining the American Dream, commits just such an error. The Menshes, two independent writers, argue that Huck Finn should be removed from the required reading lists of America's schools due to its racist content. However, from the beginning they refuse to overlook the social influences that surround Twain's novel. In fact, they center their twentieth-century argument on a detailed examination of nineteenth-century attitudes. By focusing on the social standards of Twain's contemporaries, the authors offer a fair-minded and insightful investigation of the racial issues in the novel.

Before evaluating the racial content, the Menshes place Twain's work in its historical context. As the authors demonstrate, two disparate nineteenth century cultural genres served as direct antecedents to Huck Finn: the slave narratives and minstrelsy. Slave narratives, which became best selling novels in the late antebellum period, were autobiographies written by former slaves. These black autobiographies created a "rising protest against slavery . . . [and demonstrated] the disparity between the slaves and the stereotypes created of them" (35). During this same period, though, the minstrel shows "dominated nineteenth-century entertainment" as well (38). In minstrelsy, white men appeared on stage and wore what the Menshes call the "blackface"-a derisive mimicking of slaves' skin color, dress, and way of life. This prominent pop-cultural form not only reinforced the negative stereotypes of blacks but also defended the institution of slavery itself. By demonstrating Twain's connection to these antithetical genres, the authors provide a concrete means of determining where Huck Finn undermines or upholds traditional racial beliefs.

Having established a nineteenth-century standard with which we can weigh Twain's social progressivism, the authors offer a shrewd and original close reading of Huck Finn. In fact, in a number of cases, their arguments subvert our most fundamental notions of the novel. For instance, through the years, critics have seen Jim and Huck's rafting trip down the Mississippi River as a symbol of freedom: a white boy and a black man forsake societal restraints and travel together. The Menshes, however, emphasize a disturbing twist into this traditional reading; the raft is not headed towards freedom-it's headed south, deeper into slave-holding country. Various critics have confronted this troubling contradiction; but the Menshes take an entirely novel approach. They argue that Twain's decision to send a fugitive-slave south demonstrates minstrelsy's implicit influence on the book. By heading south, Jim looks like the prototypical, minstrel-type, dimwitted fool. Consequently, the novel's central symbol of freedom turns into a stereotypically silly black character's mere illusion of freedom.

The authors recognize that their response to the novel is very much a late twentieth-century one; in fact, one of the most valuable aspects of the book is its depiction of the way critical reactions to Huck Finn have changed throughout the years. The Menshes demonstrate quite clearly that when Huck Finn was first published in 1885, critics ignored racial issues entirely. To the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century critic, the maltreatment of Jim did not appear at all out of the ordinary. Only recently, have critics even begun to recognize the racist implications in the novel. But what is even more provocative than the Menshes' recognition of this critical progression is their explanation for it. According to the authors, critics have overlooked Twain's racism because historically they have disregarded blacks' opinions. They write succinctly, "In a classic debate, there is mutual agreement on the terms; in the Huck Finn debate, one side set them" (112). Until recently, this one side has been entirely composed of whites.

Thoroughly researched, Black, White, and "Huck Finn" forces us to question Twain's place in the racially mixed modern school system. It is true that at times the book appears to be more a sociological study than a literary one. After all, the central focus of the book is Huck Finn's relation to the classroom-not to the art of literature. But regardless of the authors' ultimate intentions for making their argument, the book provides an uncompromising analysis of Huck's and Jim's actions, attitudes, and motivations. It focuses a twentieth-century discussion on nineteenth-century terms.