ONE DROP: MY FATHER'S HIDDEN LIFE by Bliss Broyard

BIOG

BROYARD

Bliss Broyard knew her father, Anatole Broyard, as the successful book critic for the New York Times and later, as the editor of the New York Times Book Review. In the months before he died of cancer, he yearned to reveal a lifelong secret to his children but succumbed before he mustered up the courage.

It was their mother who told the children that their father had actually been African-American. His light-skinned parents had moved from New Orleans to New York in 1927 where they passed for white in order to get work.

For Bliss, "raised white in Connecticut," this revelation set off a search for identity and reunions with a large extended family in the South. One Drop is a compelling look at the complexities of race from a very personal perspective.