My Long Trip Home A Family Memoir Author:Mark Whitaker In a dramatic, moving work of historical reporting and personal discovery, an award-winning journalist sets out to trace the story of what happened to his parents, a fascinating but star-crossed interracial couple, and arrives at a new understanding of the family dramas that shaped their lives?and his own. His father, ?Syl? Whitaker, was the ch... more »arismatic grandson of slaves who grew up the child of black undertakers from Pittsburgh and went on to become a groundbreaking scholar of Africa. His mother, Jeanne Theis, was a shy World War II refugee from France whose father, a Huguenot pastor, helped hide thousands of Jews from the Nazis and Vichy police. They met in the mid-1950s, when he was a college student and she was his professor, and they carried on a secret romance for over a year before marrying and having two boys. Eventually they split in a bitter divorce that was followed by decades of unhappiness as his mother coped with self-recrimination and depression while trying to raise her sons by herself and his father spiraled into an alcoholic descent that destroyed his once meteoric career. Echoing the interracial themes of Barack Obama?s Dreams From My Father and James McBride?s The Color of Water, and the drama of Jeanette Walls?s The Glass Castle, Whitaker?s memoir is a reporter?s search for the factual and emotional truth about a complicated and compelling family?a truth that leads him, finally, not just to forgive his parents but to gain a new knowledge and acceptance of himself.« less