Dancing with Strangers: A Memoir

by Mel Watkins

Overview

From a renowned editor of The New York Times comes a moving memoir that recounts his life from its start.

Beginning with his turbulent childhood as an African American coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s, Mel Watkins pens a poignant and powerful memoir of his life at all stages, including his relationship with his brother who was addicted to drugs and violence and his connection with his grandmother, who inspired him to reach for the sky.

“Mel Watkins has written a lovely book—warm and smart—that is much more than a memoir. Ohio and its black population have never been better served.” — Toni Morrison

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743245418
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	07/01/2002
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Mel Watkins is a widely known American critic, author, and former staff member of The New York Times, where is was the first African-American editor of the Times Sunday Book Review.

Editorial Reviews

Watkins, a former editor at the New York Times Book Review and author of The Real Side, a capacious history of African-American humor, confines himself here to his childhood and youth. Unfortunately, his story lacks sufficient drama or style to achieve full momentum. Watkins grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, the child of black Southerners who landed up north in Youngstown, Ohio, with a promise of "opportunity." Though his parents brawled and his brother went to prison, young Mel was mentored by his fierce and proud father and embraced playing basketball and baseball and reading. Amid overly dense detail, his memoir retains a consistently interesting thread concerning race. Raised unencumbered by "rigid social conventions," Watkins eventually encountered white racism, but his experience in an integrated high school was mostly positive. A scholarship student at Colgate in upstate New York in the early 1960s, he had to adapt to an overwhelmingly white world but found solace in reading Sartre and James Baldwin, and discovered he had no trouble dating both black and white women. Before he graduated, a summer living in Harlem while working as a newspaper copyboy furthered his embrace of black culture, the product, Watkins concluded, not of "primal racial identity... but the externally imposed experience of repression." Further fueled by classroom disparagement of black culture when he returned to Colgate, Watkins resolved to celebrate that culture in his future life. The story leaves the reader wanting to learn more about Watkins's quest, but the book ends a few pages later.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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"

Library Journal

Coming-of-age recollections by a former editor at the Book Review, a black man of independent mind and little patience with those of any race who too easily arrive at conclusions.

NY Times Book Review