arts & entertainment
Book Review: ‘My Long Trip Home — A Family Memoir’ by Mark Whitaker
By kam Williams
Special to The Skanner News
A
s managing editor of CNN
Worldwide, Mark Whit -
aker is currently in charge
of content and reporting for the
world’s largest global television
network. Previously, he made his-
tory as Newsweek’s first African
American editor-in-chief.
To his credit, Whitaker has
achieved his phenomenal, profes-
sional success in spite of being
raised in a very dysfunctional fam-
ily by parents as different as night
and day, literally and figuratively.
His mother, Jeanne, was in her
fourth year as a French professor
at Swarthmore College when she
found herself being pursued by
one of her students, Syl.
Since this was America in the
1950s, perhaps of more signifi-
cance than their age difference
was the fact that she was white,
conventional and the daughter of
devout Christian missionaries
while he was black, immature, and
a relatively-bohemian free-love
advocate. Nonetheless, the unlike-
ly couple secretly embarked on a
torrid affair and wed just a couple
of months after his graduation.
Reflecting both a reporter’s
painstaking attention to detail and
a Prodigal Son’s sincere search for
closure and redemption, “My
Long Trip Home” is a riveting,
revealing, and heartbreaking
memoir affirming the potential of
even the messiest of lives to blos-
som belatedly into something sat-
isfying and beautiful.
26 th annuaL
News
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Page 6 The Portland and Seattle Skanner November 16, 2011