The Genius Of James Brown
Geoffrey O’Brien considers James McBride‘s book on James Brown by mentioning McBride’s earlier book on Brown: ‘In his 1996 memoir “The Color of Water,” James McBride describes a difficult moment of his boyhood in the 1960s. Raised in Queens, along with eleven siblings, by a black stepfather and a white mother (a Polish Jew who had told her children little about her origins), he was sent to predominantly Jewish schools at the insistence of his mother. She was intent on his getting what she considered the best education available, even if she herself had long been cut off from her family, ever since marrying an African-American minister and converting to Christianity.’
