My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir

Mark Whitaker's father, "Syl" Whitaker, was the charismatic 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 more than ...