In just over a decade, Barbadian-born Cecil Foster has emerged as one of this country's most published black writers, with three novels and an award-winning nonfiction book about being black in Canada. Before coming here in 1979, Foster had already distinguished himself as a journalist in the Caribbean with the influential Barbados Advocate-News and with CANA, the regional news agency. Since coming to Canada he has worked and written for such major media outlets as The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and CBC-TV; recently he resigned as special adviser to Ontario's Progressive Conservative minister of culture.

The raw facts of Foster's history, as laid down in his latest book, Island Wings: A Memoir, are compelling enough on their own. Just a toddler when his father, then his mother, emigrated to England, he and his two brothers went to live with one then the other of his grandmothers as part of the "left behinds,"  "barrel  children"  relishing the packages that came from England, living on promises of being sent for, longing for the day when they too would leave Barbados.

Foster's was the first generation of the newly independent island nation to benefit from the government funding of education. His is the tale of the poor, bright boy who overcomes poverty and a fractious family life to succeed in winning scholarships, becoming a teacher (briefly) and settling on being a journalist. Along the way, Foster tells us about the history of Barbados; discusses the politics of the region; offers   some interesting observations about the development and role of journalism in West Indian society; and recounts tales of friends, schoolmates and the community of Lodge road, where he grew up.

There are poignant moments when Foster writes about the feelings of separation from his parents, who now had a new family in England and no longer kept in touch; and when critical articles he wrote brought physical threats from the government and the Prime Minister,  precipitating his flight from Barbados. He writes compassionately and compellingly too about his father, once one of the island's finest musicians, who left to join the British army but who was now living in reclusive poverty in London, cut off from family and Barbados and British society: "I feel a close bond to this man who so tortuously restrained himself from openly showing me any emotion, from actually apologizing for the separation that hurt me so much and my two brothers so much."

But Island wings doesn't swing. Its potential is undermined by a plodding, perfunctory prose style replete with a steady stream of awkward and laborious sentences ("The week I returned to Barbados came unexpected news", and, "Only then is the record official") that clutter the narrative, dull the emotional appeal of the story and choke the impact of its remembrances, anecdotes and recollections. The book also suffers from a conceptual confusion in which Foster the journalist, amateur sociologist and political pundit overshadows Foster the narrator and novelist, creating an unnecessary formalism and distance that gives the book a third-person narrative feel.

 This is "memoirs by the numbers" with a too-tentative tone of too many "perhaps," "maybes" and "mights"; a penchant for uncorroborated pronouncements (as when he calls Grenada's revolutionary coup leader Maurice Bishop a "marxist dictator" and its Grand Anse "arguably the most beautiful beach in the Caribbean"); and an untoward, casual construction of information that often hugs the line separating necessary context and filler. In  the end,  Island  Wings' problems ground its accomplishments.

At one point, explaining his shift from teaching to journalism, Foster writes, "There was something magnetic about news. The magic of information and entertainment, of transmitting thoughts and ideas and getting a rise out of people  — reasons why I had long dreamed of becoming a communicator. Teaching and news reporting — didn't they have the same intent and purpose of trying to pass on information and knowledge?"

What we get with Island Wings, though, is more information than entertainment.