Ron Chaplin asked if I would elaborate a bit on the race theme in Richard Powers' "the Time of our Singing" without giving away too much of the plot. Well, here goes with just a little of the plot. It's a long book covering several generations and, in the background, a swathe of modern history, yet it revolves round a single (actual historical) event. In 1939 an attempt was made to arrange a concert by Marian Anderson in Constitution Hall in Washington. The Daughters of the American Revolution, owners of the hall, decided that the time was not ready for what we would now call an African American, however distinguished, to appear in the hall. "Sometime in the future" writes the narrator of the novel, "Or shortly thereafter". So, with the support of Mrs Roosevelt, Marian Anderson gave a free concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Amongst the crowd of 75,000 is, in the novel, a young woman, Delia, an aspiring singer, not even given an audition by the conservatory, thanks to racial discrimination. Marian Anderson is her role model. Her eyes meet those of a young man, David Strom, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, a colleague of Einstein working on the general theory of relativity: (a useless activity, like music, he says ; and we wonder). It is love at first first sight. They bring up their children in an intense musical atmosphere, singing together every day (so the title) and protecting them, they thought, from a harsh world of discrimination. Actually, says the narrator, their son Joseph, a pianist, we were protecting them. Powers, in the narrative by Joseph Strom, uses language in a rhapsodic and musical way to explore the themes of the power of music, time, mathematics, and racial identity. It is clever, discursive, and thought-provoking, never pretentious, and certainly never dull. George Marshall Cheshire, England