From Library Journal
Watkins (On the Real Side, LJ 2/1/94), a former New York Times editor, shares here what his life was like growing up in Youngstown, Ohio, in the Fifties and Sixties in the midst of segregation and racism. He begins his story as the youngest member of a dysfunctional family, with an abusive, out-of-control father. Leaving no stone unturned, Watkins speaks of his brother's drug addiction; his grandparents' interracial relationship, which couldn't result in marriage; his passion for basketball; and his college years. Telling of his attachment to his grandmother and how he benefited from her wisdom, he reveals how devastated he was when she died. He gives an extended view of his college life: his friends, sexual escapades, extracurricular activities, and studies, and then he graduates, thereby ending his tale. Is there life after college? If so, Watkins doesn't fill in that missing piece of the puzzle. Considering that he is nearly 60 years old, it would have been more interesting to learn of his career moves and midlife crises. Without these components, this story is incomplete and less than appealing. Not a necessary purchase.?Ann Burns, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
This gracefully written memoir by a New York Times editor involved for much of the past 20 years with the Book Review offers another angle on the experience of growing up African American during the '50s and '60s. Watkins was a prewar baby--like the older activists profiled in Halberstam's Children --whose troubled family moved soon after his birth from Memphis to Youngstown, seeking financial security in the steel industry. Young Mel's childhood thus differed from that of his volatile father, Tennessee, and older brothers and sisters, who had spent their formative years under Jim Crow. Youngstown was no paradise but held opportunities that led Watkins to sports and, ultimately, to NCAA basketball and challenging academic studies at Colgate University. Watkins read Sartre and Baldwin and decided the way to fight the racial fictions obsessing Americans was to challenge, laugh at, make guerrilla war on the pseudoscientific idea of race; the respect he's earned at the heart of the publishing industry suggests he's won significant victories. Mary Carroll
