PEOPLE IN BONDAGE

The first title in Lerner's new ``Runestone'' imprint is an only slightly revised reprint of a 1971 publication—a fact mentioned nowhere in the book—with more readable layout but mostly recycled b&w illustrations (except for a photo of demonstrators protesting the Rodney King verdict). This sweeping survey of the Arab and European slave trade, sandwiched between brief accounts of slavery in the ancient world and the abolition of trade in African captives (at least to the Americas) is written largely in generalities (``The Underground Railroad was risky but full of adventure''). Wide-ranging and usable but drab, especially compared to Meltzer's All Times, All Peoples (1980) or Hamilton's Many Thousand Gone (p. 147). Index. (Nonfiction. 11- 13)