NONFICTION - Dec. 25, 1994

GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean by Jan Carew (Lawrence Hill Books: $24.95 cloth, $14.95 paper; 176 pp.). The subtitle of this book is misleading, for Jan Carew spent only a few days with Malcolm X, when the Muslim leader was in Britain to give a speech at the London School of Economics. Those were important days for Malcolm, however; in the previous 14 months he had broken with the Nation of Islam, again traveled to Mecca and begun the transformation from angry black American revolutionary to angry international statesman . . . an evolution never completed, since Malcolm was assassinated in New York less than a fortnight after the London address. Carew, director of the Center for the Comparative Study of the Humanities at Lincoln University and a native of Guyana, provides some new details about Malcolm’s Grenada-born mother and his latter-day thinking, but “Ghosts in Our Blood,” to its detriment, is actually more about Carew than Malcolm X. Those who know Carew’s work--he’s a novelist and playwright as well as an academic--may be interested in this book, but those who want to know more about Malcolm X would be better off reading (or rereading) his classic “Autobiography,” even if it scants his last, more conciliatory views on race and revolution.