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Rebecca Walker's mother is celebrated author Alice Walker, and her father is prominent lawyer Mel Leventhal, but this candid autobiography doesn't rely on its celebrity connections. Black, White, and Jewish is, as Jane Lazarre has noted, a "beautifully written meditation on the creation of a woman's' sense of self."
Asha Bandele
I have to admit that when I first eyed the title of Walker's memoir a measurable amount of suspicion lurked in my heart. I worried that upon reading it, I would find myself entangled in a wishy-washy, whiny diatribe that avoided a meaningful political or social center. So many books, films and other forms of media that purport to add something urgent to the discussion on race in America, woefully fall short or just plain fail. This book is not one of them.
Walker has written, in blunt, stunning and intelligent language, a vital story about what it meant to come of age in two worlds that existed, largely, in diametric opposition. Here, she makes it clear that she is an author with her own necessary and brilliant voice. Early on she writes, "I am not a bastard, the product of rape, the child of some white devil. I am a Movement Child. My parents tell me I can do anything I put my mind to, that I can be anything I want…I am not tragic."
Throughout the book, the honesty with which Walker confronts her confusion, her loves, her desires, her sexuality and her anger, makes the reader want to turn away, lest she be accused of spying, or worse, uncover pieces of her own self. That's what happened to me. Reading this book, I was forced to recall my own childhood in which a white world was imposed on me vis-à-vis private schools, summer camps and dance classes.
Black, White & Jewish is a virtual road map-a guide through the complexities of race and childhood. This is a book ready-made for the great canon of women's literature that rejects silence and surface analyses and tells the truth, whether or not we want to hear it.
— Black Issues Book Review
USA Today
...what a complex, all-American story....
San Francisco Chronicle
Walker is a fine writer, with a finely tuned sense of the intricacies of the American race labyrinth.
Kirkus Reviews
English author McGregor makes her US debut with three books in one: the story of a wandering polar bear; a fictionalized account of Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage; and, last but not least, a modern-day tearjerker. Sam Marshall, a two-year-old stricken with aplastic anemia, will die unless a bone-marrow donor can be found. The nearest match may well be his much older half-brother John, a marine archaeologist who's now lost somewhere in the Arctic while he looks for traces of the Franklin Expedition. Sam's mother, Jo Harper, the young and lovely widow of BBC-TV commentator and marine archaeologist Douglas Marshall, angered John's mother, Alicia, several years ago when Jo came to interview her about her famous ex-husband. And that was before Jo fell in love with Doug, who then died in a car crash that spared his grown son. The first Mrs. Marshall still hasn't gotten over her pique at her ex's lifelong obsession with the Franklin Expedition, and she's not about to help Jo find John. But there are others who will, among them Catherine Takkiruq, the half-Inuit beauty who loves John and is conveniently nearby in London. The race to find the young man begins, although no one knows for certain whether he's a match for Sam. Or whether Sam will even survive. See Sam waste away pathetically (and much more quickly than most victims of aplastic anemia would, the author notes coyly in an afterword). See the majestic polar bear stride across the frozen waste. See the stalwart 19th-century explorers perish one by one from cold and disease and starvation. See the author do her hardest to tie this triple-threat plot together in every possible way: thepolar bear is a mother too, with a sick cub. Hopelessly contrived.
From the Publisher
"Compelling."—The Washington Post
"Stunningly honest."—San Francisco Chronicle
"A complex, all-American story."—USA Today
"Walker masterfully illuminates differences between black and white America...A heartbreaking tale of self-creation."—People
"[Walker] offers painful childhood memories of straddling two vastly different cultures—black bohemia and Jewish suburbia—to fashion a cautionary tale about the power of race in shaping identity...[a] highly readable debut."—Entertainment Weekly
"Walker [writes with] elegant, discreet candor...will attract a wealth of well-deserved praise."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A beautifully written meditation on the creation of a woman’s sense of self."—Jane Lazarre, author of Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness
"Powerful...deeply affecting."—Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia
