THE DUST-JACKET blurb salutes this recent study of minority voting rights as a book raising important questions that deserve to be debated in public.” The praise in this description is certainly well deserved. The hope for further public debate is almost certainly unfounded, however. Thernstrom’s impressively detailed and thoughtful study does return, over and over again, to some troubling and fundamental questions raised by the contemporary treatment of “voting rights.” But the book itself documents the extreme reluctance of almost everyone in public life to confront these questions.