Divided To The Vein: A Journey into Race and Family [Hardcover]

Scott Minerbrook (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 29, 1996

Born of a favored son of Chicago's aspiring black bourgeoisie and the idealistic daughter of white Southeast Missouri farmers, Scott Minerbrook grew up in the 1950s and '60s in a world characterized by both the highest ideals of racial integration and the grim realities of racial separatism and willful ignorance. In his late thirties, Minerbrook set out to claim the white grandparents who had refused to recognize his existence. Despite their determination to "keep things just as they are," he knew that bringing down the daunting barrier called race was essential to his humanity, and to theirs. In the course of his journey, Minerbrook takes a hard look at his upbringing and at the lives of his parents and considers how their habits of mind have touched his. Lyrically written, painfully honest, psychologically and socially astute, Minerbrook's memoir challenges all of us to overcome the cult of race and to move beyond it.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"I couldn't love myself if I hated my own flesh and blood," declares Minerbrook, a black journalist for U.S. News & World Report, explaining his effort to reconnect with his white maternal grandmother, who cut off her daughter when she married a black man. When he visited her Missouri farm town in an attempt to see her, he was thwarted; a year later, he found grace in a reunion. His book encompasses those stories and the larger stories of his parents' paths and his own troubled upbringing. His father's family were bourgeois strivers; his mother's family was long shamed by poverty. His parents' marriage was stormy, even violent; as a youth, after a move to suburbia, Minerbrook pursued both studies and sports as a way to fit, uneasily, with both whites and blacks. At Harvard, he felt personal liberation, even as he felt discomfort among the comformingly nationalist fellow black students. There he embraced Orwell, whose works "encouraged me to be honest with myself"; such honesty, infused with both passion and a spirit of forgiveness, animates this memorable book. Photos. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Like Gregory Williams's Life on the Color Line (LJ 2/1/95), these two memoirs describe growing up interracial from the perspective of the sons of African American fathers and white mothers. McBride, an accomplished journalist and musician, has viewed the yawning chasm of racial division from both sides and, despite carving out a successful life, has been scarred. Unlike Williams and Minerbrook, though, he focuses on a single, singular parent, a rabbi's daughter who later helped her husband establish an all-black Baptist church in her home and saw 12 children through college. His mother's own story, juxtaposed with McBride's, helps make this book a standout. Recommended for all collections. Minerbrook's father came from Chicago's African American high society, his mother from rural Missouri. He paints a detailed portrait of their family life, of relationships complicated by the fact that "human emotions, when mixed with racial issues, are prone to shatter like glass." Nearing middle age, he seeks out the white side of his family, who have rejected his mother and her offspring, and achieves a well-deserved catharsis. Still, his accounts of the almost unrelenting prejudice of white against black, black against white, light-skinned black against dark-skinned black, and so on are deeply disturbing. One is left to borrow the words of another recent commentator and say that this cancer does indeed make me want to holler. Highly recommended.
-?Jim Burns, Ottumwa P.L., Ia.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (January 29, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151931070
• ISBN-13: 978-0151931071
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,867,908 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT, June 10, 2001

A Kid's Review

This review is from: Divided To The Vein: A Journey into Race and Family (Hardcover)

I read this for a book report. It really shows the inhumanity of humaninty!!!!

5.0 out of 5 stars Divided to the Vein - Scott Minerbrook, August 24, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Divided To The Vein: A Journey into Race and Family (Hardcover)

A brave and gutsy chronicle of an inter-racial family. Minerbrook draws vivid pictures of human beings struggling with cultural differences, gender issues, and parental failings as well as unyielding prejudice by both races. He never condemns, only describes grippingly. He not only survived; he achieved wholeness and stability despite stunning obstacles. I'll never look at a bi-racial person the same way again.