A great many books have been written about Harlem, but for social history none has surpassed Gilbert Osofsky's account of how a pleasant, pastoral upper-middle-class suburb of Manhattan turned into an appalling black slum within forty years. Mr. Osofsky sets his chronicle against the background of pre-Harlem black life in New York City and in the context of the radical changes in race relations in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He traces Harlem's change to the largest segregated neighborhood in the nation and then its fall to a slum. Throughout he neatly...