The Color of WaterA Black Man's Tribute To His White Mother

Audiobook Download Information

Edition:

Unabridged (Phoenix Audio)

Length:

6 hours, 50 minutes

File Size:

188 MB (6 files)

Published:

May 2006

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Summary

Quotes from the Critics

"An eloquent narrative in which a young black man searches for his roots--against the wishes of his mother. Mc Bride, a professional saxophonist and former staff writer for the Boston Globe and Washington Post, grew up with 11 siblings in an all-black Brooklyn, New York, housing project. As a child, he became aware that his mother was different from others around him: She was white, and she kept secrets...McBride's mother should take much pleasure in this loving if sometimes uncomfortable memoir, which embodies family values of the best kind. Other readers will take pleasure in it as well." - Kirkus

"...[S]uffused with issues of race, religion and identity. Yet those issues, so much a part of their lives and stories, are not central. The triumph of the book--and of their lives--is that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories by family love, the sheer force of a mother's will and her unshakable insistence that only two things really mattered: school and church...it is her voice--unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic--that is dominant in this paired history, and its richest contribution....The two stories, son's and mother's, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note at a time of racial polarization." - New York Times Book Review

"As James discovers the facts of [his white mother's] childhood, he hears about a disturbed family of Orthodox Jews living on the edge of a Southern town, in a no-man's land between the black and white communities. So the book tells two life stories, Ruth's and James's--both stories are gripping and unusuals. Both tell of human struggles in a country divided by religion and race." - Kliatt