Handlin has even found the recipe. Take a family, black not Italian, he says and trace it back to Africa. Make sure it's your history recalled by your grandmother and no one will know the difference because you are its living witness. Handlin says Haley really added yeast to his story when he devoted "85 per cent of his attention to the period before the Civil War, the time least subject to reader verification, the time most readily freighted with nostalgia and fantasy for their benefit."

Juffure never existed says Handlin. Especially the references to the way those Africans behaved: all available evidence proves Africans had no concept of Africa, nor did they regard all Africans as brothers. Also, according to Handlin, Haley's Kunta Kinte is not a man of the 18th-century West African coast, but a 20th-century civil rights activist.

Handlin insists that he does not want black Americans to feel left out of history, but instead wishes to show them myths are not the answer. Myths deny the dignity of those who lived and died unrecognized, he says.

But Handlin misses the point. Just as evidence exists that things happened one way, there are gaps in history where things may have occurred differently. Only where there is evidence is there history, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian tells us. Thus it follows that if there is no evidence, there is no history. How many African tribes kept records at City Hall? Or better yet, how many American Indians kept council meeting notes? Does this mean that black and native Americans have no history? Is that why schoolchildren are repeatedly told Columbus discovered America when native Americans were here first?

Five pages after Handlin's bitter and unsubstantiated critique of Roots, he chooses once again to excuse the writings of John Burgess and of William Dunning that gave credibility to contemporary theories of racial inferiority proposed by social and biological sciences. Sure they were wrong because they allowed their racist attitude to influence their writing of history, Handlin says. Nonetheless, they deserve no more than a slap on the wrist. After all, these works "were products of serious scholarship, had respectable scientific underpinnings, and earned respect as useful contributions to the solution of current problems." Some people found them useful, anyway--state legislators held up these books as supporting "evidence" for Jim Crow laws. But Handlin excuses "the occasional racist slurs" of the 1940s and '50s, calling them "less troubling than the injustice" a few historians served earlier ethnic peoples by falsifying their history "to gratify the passions of their descendants."

Handlin may remain a disappointed man for some time. Truth from accurate evidence is only one part of the search for real history. The other is selection of evidence from uncertain sources and interpretation; these will always remain judgmental decisions.

Aside from his views of where historians have gone wrong. Handlin proposes a strong if not portentous case for accuracy. He has paid close attention to history, but the same challenge could be issued to every academic discipline which proposes to teach that which the public could not discover for itself. The book is nothing new, just a dressy version of earlier ideas filled with one clear message. Historians should try not to disappoint Handlin again.