A new documentary history edited by William Worger, an associate professor of history at UCLA, with two other researchers linked to the James S. Coleman African Studies Center, explores the 500-year relationship between Africa and the West, not in a dry history but through the poignant voices of the people who lived to tell the tale.

"This is the first full-scale documentary history of the relationship between Africa and the West from the 1400s to the end of the 20th century," said Worger, who put together the 400-page tome with fellow editors Nancy Clark, a history professor from California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, and Edward Alpers, a history professor at UCLA. The team collectively has spent nearly 80 years traveling the highways and byways of African history.

Through the memoirs of freed slaves and the diaries of authors of some of the first treaties with the West, among other sources, we hear disparate viewpoints - the abolitionists, the colonists, opponents of colonialism and leaders of independence movements. Even the rationale for apartheid is included, in the words of its chief architect, Hendrik Verwoerd.

Almost without exception, the entries are written by people who were themselves engaged in historical events, and nearly 75% of the voices are African, many of them ordinary people.

"What we've tried to do with these documents is both explain the situation in which people found themselves and how they not only survived an era of oppression, but how they struggled against the oppression, poverty or violence around them," Worger said.

In illuminating the bigger picture of Africa's history, the editors included 130 entries, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, beginning with a 1441 account of the first Portuguese attempts to establish settlements along Africa's northwest coast and ending with Nelson Mandela's speech delivered at his 1994 inauguration as president of independent South Africa.

"We didn't try to be encyclopedic because there are more than 700 million people in more than 60 countries in Africa," Worger said. "But we did try to explore several basic themes common to all of the continent: the era of the slave trade, the link between abolition and the conquest of Africa by European powers, colonialism and its critics, and the challenges of post-colonial independence."

- Meg Sullivan

"Phoenix Eyes," by Russell Charles Leong (University of Washington Press)

A monk in Southern California searches for an artist capable of painting a traditional many-leafed Bodhi tree, which distracts him from the difficulties of adjusting to a new country.

A young teenager, sold into prostitution to finance her brothers' education, saves her hair trimmings - the one part of her body that is under her own control - to burn once a year in a temple ritual.

A documentary film producer raised in a noisy Hong Kong family marvels at the popular image of Asian Americans as a silenced minority.

A UCLA adjunct English professor, Russell Leong tells these and other tales in "Phoenix Eyes," named one of the best works of fiction last year by Los Angeles Times book reviewers. This collection of 14 intriguing and sometimes disturbing short stories reveals the lives of characters linked and separated by their experiences as modern Asians and Asian Americans.

Leong, an award-winning poet, essayist, critic, short story writer, documentary filmmaker and editor at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, sorts his stories into three sections: "Leaving," "Samsara" and "Paradise."

"Leaving" deals with daughters and sons who leave their families in Asia or in America; "Samsara" focuses on characters attached to sexual desire of all varieties; and the last, "Paradise," examines the quashed dreams of those seeking paradise on earth in America. From "Paradise" comes the title story, which is about life in a trans-Pacific prostitution service. Terence, an Asian American who has "phoenix eyes" - eyes of "longing and lust" - becomes a call-boy in Asia, and we follow him from Seattle to Taipei, then Hong Kong to Los Angeles.

"Although people tend to focus upon sexuality in 'Phoenix Eyes,' my stories are really about what drives my characters - into the arms of another, or into the arms of loneliness or religion. My characters are offsprings of Asian migration and their attachment to the world of Samsara - the state of ignorance, desire and rebirth - in Buddhism," Leong said. "And though we think of the phoenix as traditionally female, there is a male phoenix that is mentioned in Chinese myth going back to the third century B.C. I try to draw from all these sources in composing my stories about the present."

- Marisa Osorio