Rating: 
Summary: Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self
Review: I am also 31, mixed, have a Jewish step-dad, and was raised by activist parents as well. Obviously, I ran to get this book. I also saw a reading Rebecca Walker did on CSPAN in Maryland. She has an amazing voice and she really brought the material alive during the reading. I think she has a vast amount of wisdom & experience to share and she handled the question and answer segment amazingly well. Unfortunately, this book is not all it could have been. It reads like a very good first or second draft but it simply isn't cohesive or particularly insightful and should not have been published yet. I really wanted Ms. Walker to move beyond cataloging events to weaving a story, a narrative that explored her experience AND connected it to a larger discussion about race. The experiences she had especially having activist parents are ones that many of us can relate to but she never pushes the work past her self. Why does she think her parents raised her the ways in which they did? An exploration of their motives could illuminate some of the ways an entire country was shaped by the 60's. She doesn't extrapolate from her experience to show how her experience as a "brown" woman is significant, how it is different than mono-racial teenage angst. Maybe that complete experience is ineffable - but there aren't any real moments that show the complexity of our experience as mixed race people. She really needed someone who believed in the importance of this book and the story she could have told. I think her editor simply thought this would sell based on the subject matter and the fact that her mom is a famous writer. I applaud Ms. Walker's attempt but I am disappointed in the final product. All you mixed people out there - we need to write and connect with each other - keep working! And we really need some male mixed voices!
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing.
Review: There is a lot of whining and self-pity here. Not that Walker doesn't have every reason to feel that way, but it doesn't make for insightful or interesting literature. She analyzes very little, and sloughs a lot off onto race that is really about adolescence (what teen does feel comfortable in his or her skin?) and being a child of divorced, clueless parents. Unlike Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club," where the author made the people around her understandable and human despite their astounding failings, Walker never gets below the surface. Her cast of characters remain stick figures. There are a lot of tired sterotypes. For example, she blames her neurotic inner life on her Jewish side of the family. Her mother leaves her to fend for herself for days on end when she is all of eleven, leading her into a sad precocious sexuality, but it's those Jews that messed her up? Hello?
Rating: 
Summary: 4.5 stars: Autobiography of An Individual
Review: Rebecca Walker's story is vivid, unselfsparing, compelling. It took us 30 hours to read, with the customary interruptions. We agree with those who say that it is not invariably cheerful, and we concur that it helps to be the daughter of someone famous if one is trying to get a book published. Nonetheless, we deem this a necessary book for anyone who has lived in the USA for any part of the last thirty years. Rebecca Walker has invited us into her life. Not all of the details of that life are pretty. Were there wrong choices made? To be sure. Does she set herself up as a role model? It's hard to detect anything like that. Rebecca Walker speaks of her role as a "bridge" or a "walkway" between two worlds, It is a role which she has not chosen, a role of which (she concedes) she often tires. There are "gatekeepers" -- excluders -- in both worlds (we almost said "in both camps," implying a military campaign); there are people who indict her, silently perhaps, for lacking something necessary. Or for having something they wish she didn't have. It is sometimes hard for the reader to remember what city Rebecca is describing, as she moved back and forth like a human tennis ball from her mother's house in San Francisco to her father & stepmother's house in notably non-diverse Larchmont, but we are patient with the disjunctures in the narrative, because that's the way it happened. Rebecca Walker does not live in a constant state of seething rage, nor does she use her having been excluded from various circles as an excuse to exclude. Most frequently in her adolescence, she seems "caught between the Scylla and Charybdis," careful not to talk too white among black friends, careful to preserve her blackness among whites. There is an abortion at age fourteen, and despite the conscious effort to remain impassive about it, we detect in one paragraph an embryonic awareness that what is ended in this "procedure" is a human life. This reviewer doesn't have a whole lot in common with the author, except a birth-year and a shared lexicon of pop-culture references; nonetheless, we find this book laudable, and are mystified by the lukewarm reviews it has received in some quarters. We would gladly read the next book by Rebecca Walker, as long as it isn't a leftist political tract or something like that. The most noticeable flaw in "Black, White & Jewish" is a trivial math error on page eleven. A necessary book from an author of poise and considerable talent.
Rating:
Summary: What a Voice.
Review: I just finished watching Rebecca Walker on C-SPAN book notes from College Park Maryland. She read several extended passages. Her honest, detailed, revealing accounts of experience and the emotions and thoughts that go with them were incredible. Perhaps the book is too full of "poor me" and teenage angst, I don't know. But the person who wrote it is an adult who has learned from the experiences now published. Perhaps the person who came out of that life makes the story for us. In an hour or more of reading and q&a it crossed my mind that she might be Alice Walker's daughter, but it was not clear or apparent and I believe Rebecca too is gifted with a voice that will talk to us for years to come. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of the book!
Rating: 
Summary: Not quite what I expected
Review: I found myself interested in reading this book as a feminist, a Jew, and a young woman who is white but interested in learning more about biracial perspectives. I thought Rebecca Walker would have some thought-provoking and unusual things to say. However, I found something very different from what I expected. The book was, above all things, emotionally raw, and I cannot decide whether that works to its advantage or its detriment, as it is a quality which places it in stark comparison to many memoirs written today. I understood Walker's frustration at having to shift, as she puts it, from place to place and culture to culture. However, I did not feel like I came away with any greater understanding of the biracial/bicultural experience, only a comprehension of what it was like for this one woman, and I felt like the things that she stated about the biracial experience were things I could have just assumed for myself, having what I hope is a vaguely good understanding of how people work. (I would not, however, claim to know them fully, as I have not gone through what she has and it would be pretentious to try and relate to it on that level.) I wonder if, when she was writing this, Walker was working for something of great literary merit or just venting about her past for 200 pages and getting it published. This is why I am unsure if the bleeding-heart emotion works for or against it. Should memoirs be organized stories, leading up to great revelations about the author's life and humanity in general? After all, this can be seen as untrue to life, as we often don't think, feel, and experience in such ways. Or should they read more like our actual lives, like this book, diary entries and successions of thoughts that run from subject to subject and feeling to feeling? I suppose I shall have to give the book this: it is certainly thought-provoking, after all.
Rating:
Summary: Not just for people of mixed races..
Review: I don't purport to be a critic of any kind, however upon reading this book, I felt a sort of indescribable urgency to express my opinion on it.. I loved it. I read it in 3 sittings and that's rare considering my hectic schedule. But I must say, that as I read chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, I could relate to so much of this book.. but I am not of mixed heritage. I am, however, a product of having been raised in two totally different cultures, and I'm talking east vs. west. To this day, I still deal with the rigors of being one way in one place and another way in another place.. when in Rome is appropriate, I guess. This book, aside from the intelligence and thoughtfulness with which it was written, was extremely therapeutic for me to read. In the end, I found myself feeling as though I had gone through those experiences myself, and some of them, I indeed have. I found myself wanting to read more. But you couldn't ask for a better ending, and in my opinion, Ms. Walker's last words are definitely words to live by, whether you are of mixed heritage or not. It is the love for the human race that is above and beyond the most important of all. As idealistic as that may sound, I found courage in my own ways of thinking, because now I know that I'm not the only one.. As I read the last few pages, particularly the one where Ms. Walker responds to a question from her lover (in that chapter her lover asks her if she 'feels' black or white and if she 'feels' for her people and their struggle) I felt chills go down my spine... because in all honesty, I couldn't have said it better myself. It's a must read... truly. I even had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Walker in Chicago and listening to her read passages from her book. If she's touring in your city, please go see her, it will definitely be worth your while. As a side note, it happens to be my personal belief that most of the people that have given the book bad reviews probably didn't understand where she was coming from at all, hence their misguided and accusatory comments. It takes an open mind to read a book like this...
Rating: 
Summary: If she weren't Alice Walker's daughter...
Review: ...this book would probably never have gotten published. Though there are some passages of clear, precise and interesting writing, these definitely take a back seat to an abundance of self-absorbed, self-pitying and undisciplined prose. The premise for the book is extremely interesting: a child born to people committed to change: unconventional, political people with causes to fight and fire in their bellies. When the world does actually change, Alice Walker and her Jewish lawyer husband Mel Leventhal find themselves polarised: Walker defines herself as black, Leventhal returns to the world of the white, Jewish liberals and daughter Rebecca is torn between the two and at home in neither world. Interesting idea. However, as the story reads, there's just too much poor, pitiful, screwed up me. I don't belong in either world. I can't make a choice, etc. Who am I? About forty pages in, the reader finds him or herself thinking, so you don't fit in, so what? What 15-year old feels comfortable? What adolescent feels their parents, teachers, relatives really understands them? The book's subtitle is "Autobiography of a Shifting Self." Very apt. You're left with a feeling of shifting perspectives and shifting emotions. But not much else. Not a great read.
Rating:
Summary: Infatuation?
Review: Walker's book is written in a moving, distinct voice. A very personal first person account from which her easy tone offers a rhythm that encourages the reader to turn the page. I saw the book as one of healing, however extrememly personal, maybe a means by which to confront the feelings that memory often leaves unapproachable. I wanted to know more. I wanted to care more. I wanted to understand why her autobiography matters and why I was falling in love with this woman's all-american search for identity. I was never able to do that. So after reading the book, I realized that her individual spirit prevails, therefore, the reader has no reason to stay engulfed in her story. Where we embrace her, she leaves us stranded. I feel as if the last sentence ("this is how memory works") leaves us with a feeling of absolute resolve that I do not feel to be the complete truth. Which, upon reflection, is the case with many of the recounted memories. They seem to be half-told, maybe half-recollected. I wanted to know less about her sex life and more about her intimate self, the woman left to discover herself in the course of all her wonderful mixtures of personalities and places and skintones. I wanted to know more about her activism.I wanted to know who listened to her the way she cared for her friends, and nurtured her mother. who was her reflection? Therefore, I find my affection for this child-turned-woman disregarded by the granduer of her own memory. I wanted the innocence to last. Instead I was left with a waning infatuation that made me relegate this book to young adult reading. I do not mean this as a demotion, but simply to say that this book does have an audience. It seems most suited to teens, young adults in the blossoming stages of claiming their identities.
Rating:
Summary: Takes a lot of ego to write your autobiography at age 31.
Review: All I can say is if you want to waste $20 and about 5 hours of your time, buy this book. You'll learn of her torrid past, her victimized youth, her stolen audi. Its a mixed up story of an over-indulged youth in a world gone amuck.
Rating:
Summary: another whining memoir by priviledged kid of famous parents
Review: This book is a long laundry list of complaints by an author who turned to promiscuity and drugs to deal with the usual teenage anxieties. She takes no responsibility for her poor choices. She blames all her turmoil on her genes, on her family, the culture and on and on. Hardly a role model for any struggling person trying to live with heart. The book is repetitious and pretty boring. I think the author ought to live another twenty years before writing an autobiography of any kind. SHe is just out of her twenties. And it shows.
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