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"Desperate Characters"
A brilliant, cheerless little classic from 1970, long out of print, resurfaces.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[06/16/99]

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"Girls' Guide" rocks!
The author of "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing" talks about single women's fiction, the trials of getting published and whether it's possible to be erotic and funny.
By Cynthia Joyce
[06/15/99]

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"The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing"
The novel may mock the literature of man-trapping, but it's still too gentle by far.
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
[06/15/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
Love me, love my wife?
Is it OK for me to see my married male friend without his wife tagging along?
By Garrison Keillor
[06/15/99]

Book Bag
Navel-gazing raised to an art
Five great contemporary books about self-consciousness.
By Ann Beattie
[06/14/99]

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It was an unusual pact for a trio of men who turned out to be unusually driven: Harvard's Gates is now one of the best-known and best-paid humanities professors in the United States; Appiah is a Harvard professor and philosopher; and Soyinka became the 1986 Nobel laureate for literature. Their objective had been the holy grail of black academics since W.E.B. Du Bois, inspired by the Encyclopedia Judaica, came up with the idea in 1909. When he started out, Du Bois put together a multiethnic staff with a Pan-African editorial mission, i.e., one that would be inclusive of the work of blacks from all over the globe. This drew some bitter criticism from the African-American community. After decades of radicalization, Du Bois changed his mind. By 1959, when he moved to Ghana, he wanted an encyclopedia for Africans by Africans about Africans.

Closer to Du Bois' original vision, Gates, Appiah and Soyinka wanted their encyclopedia to be inclusionary, one that would bring in as many disciplines, cultures and perspectives as they could. "You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty," Gates told Salon during a four-hour discussion. (Gates insisted that his comments be used only on a deep-background basis; all quotes used in this story had to be cleared with him.) "Whoever could edit the Encyclopedia Africana would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution."

Joining a trend of joint ventures between academics and corporations, Gates and company looked outside the university for funding. After a decades-long search for a backer, they landed a big fish -- Microsoft. The company agreed to put up $1 million and technical, design and production support of the CD-ROM. Another million came from Perseus, a publisher, which would produce a printed version of the encyclopedia. After much heartache -- and 25 years after the pact made at the restaurant -- the interactive CD-ROM encyclopedia, Encarta Africana, arrived on the shelves to near-unanimous praise last February.

Yet while the Africana debut has seen no dearth of press coverage, the story of its painful gestation has never been told. And it is a tale so fabulous -- including accusations of plagiarism, controversies over affirmative action, charges of academic royals oppressing scholarly serfs, Microsoft bottom-line mania, worker revolt and a Rashomon-like tangle of competing truths -- that one might even call it a creation myth for the contemporary university.

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