The dust jacket of Looking For Farrakhan describes it as an "unconventional biography"; this is an accurate description only in that it's unconventional to the point of barely being a biography at all. What it is is essentially a polemic against Farrakhan, and not a very good one at that. An independent, Chicago-based journalist with a track record of involvement in civil-rights issues, Florence Hamlish Levinsohn makes her suspicion of her subject known from the first page, a suspicion that eventually escalates to some not-too-subtle (and far-from-convincing) comparisons to Adolf Hitler. The problem is not Levinsohn's opinions; there are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of any man in possession of Farrakhan's audience, barely concealed hatred, and ideas that, as one interview subject describes them, defy logic. The problem is that the author does little to justify her opinion in any way recognizable as journalism. Farrakhan's professed religious beliefs are dismissed more than once as "loony," without much examination of what makes them so appealing to a large number of people. Even more frustrating are the book's attempts at biography—glimpses of objectivity that dissolve too quickly into unrestrained editorializing. A sequence in which the author imagines herself watching Farrakhan as a child in church, weeping at what he would become, is particularly painful; it pretty much sums up the author's commitment to objective reporting. Part of this may simply be due to the difficulty she had in obtaining access to Farrakhan or anyone close to him, but endless descriptions of her struggles to obtain interviews and conduct research don't make for an exciting book. Disjointed and uninformative when it should be revealing; tedious and repetitive when it should be persuasive, the end result makes it seem as if Levinsohn went looking for Farrakhan, couldn't find him, and unfortunately wrote a book anyway.