As a book and a movie and a social phenomenon, “The Help” functions as a kind of Rorschach test that measures how you feel about the history of racial inequality in America. Kathryn Stockett’s ...

GOD HELP THE CHILD, by Toni Morrison. Alfred A. Knopf, 178 pp., $24.95. Some 80 years ago, Toni Morrison grew up as Chloe Wofford in a racially mixed, working-class neighborhood in Ohio. So when she ...