Skinfolk: A Memoir
About this audiobook
A haunting, poignant story of growing up in a mixed-race family in 1970s New Jersey, in the tradition of The Color of Water.
Magnanimous and charming, Bob Guterl knew that he could solve the racial problems bedeviling postwar America.
Determined to stave off impending global catastrophe, the larger-than-life judge and his resolute wife, Sheryl, launched a radical experiment, raising their two biological sons alongside four children adopted from Korea, Vietnam, and the South Bronx―the so-called “war zones of the American century”―in a white clapboard house with a white picket fence in small-town New Jersey.
In lyrical, often searing prose, Matthew Guterl, a renowned historian of race and their third-eldest child, recounts the ultimately troubling story of his family; his racially diverse siblings; and his idealistic parents, with their miragelike dreams of creating a racial utopia in an otherwise all-white community.
Chronicling the siblings’ coming-of-age in a recalcitrant, discriminatory society, Skinfolk peers behind that white picket fence, revealing many of the racial issues that continue to plague Americans today.
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About the author
Matthew Pratt Guterl is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University. He is the award-winning author of four books, including Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe. He lives in Rhode Island.
George Newbern is an Earphones Award–winning narrator and a television and film actor best known for his roles as Brian MacKenzie in Father of the Bride and Father of the Bride Part II, as well as Danny in Friends. As a voice actor, he is notable for his role as Superman on the Cartoon Newtork series Static Shock, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited. He has guest starred on many television series, including Scandal, The Mentalist, Private Practice, CSI: Miami, and Numb3rs. He holds a BA in theater arts from Northwestern University.
