Sociologist SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT has written a new book about the Black middle class, "I've...

2: Sociologist SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT has written a new book about the Black middle class, "I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation" (Addison-Wesley Publishing). In the book she follows the lives of six people who are at midlife and in the black middle class, reflecting on the "necessary losses" for the price of privilege. Her book was written, in part, as a response to the 1957 book "Black Bourgeoisie" by the black sociologist Franklin Frazier. LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT took issue with Frazier's portrait of middle class blacks as materialistic assimilationists, repressed and disconnected from the larger black community. LIGHTFOOT is herself the product of the Black middle class. Her mother is a child psychoanalyst and was the subject of LIGHTFOOT's 1984 book, "Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer." LIGHTFOOT teaches at Harvard and was a recipient of a MacArthur Prize Award.