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Brich Lane Press, 1998, 238 pp., $21.95, ISBN 1-559-72491-9
SEVENTH CHILD: A FAMILY MEMOIR OF MALCOLM X, written by the late leader's nephew, Rodnell P. Collins, covers much of the familiar terrain detailed in the classic work, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A project started in the late 1960s by Collins' mother, Ella Little Collins, the memoir was inherited by the son upon his mother's death in 1996. Ella Collins, Malcolm X's sister, became his surrogate mother after their father's lynching and their mother's confinement in a mental institution. Some of the book's more revealing moments come in its chronicling of his troubled teen and prison years, and the power plays within the Nation of Islam during its glory days.
Some new facts do emerge in this latest addition to the...