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Chasing America: Notes from a Rock 'n' Soul Integrationist - Hardcover

Watlington, Dennis

 
9780312271893: Chasing America: Notes from a Rock 'n' Soul Integrationist
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0312271891 ISBN 13: 9780312271893
Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

"And I thought I knew this crazy-brave black boy who bolted out of a Harlem ghetto into a white prep school and bobbed and weaved his way across the treacherous divide between black and white America. But Dennis Watlington's life story is even more astonishing than I knew. He emerges a no-jive black integrationist who is proud of the slave ancestry that makes him a solid American foreperson." -Gail Sheehy, bestselling author of Passages and Understanding Men's Passages
 
Chasing America is a rollercoaster ride through promise and poverty, affirmative action and addiction, and a powerful story that captures a life and an era that is seminally American.
Born in Harlem in 1952, Dennis developed a heroin habit at the age of 14, kicked it, and received a scholarship to the Hotchkiss School where he was elected president of his class. He went on to NYU, became involved in film and theater (he had a small role in The Deerhunter and gave Bruce Willis his start in a play called Bullpen), got addicted to crack, kicked that, and became an Emmy winning television writer.
Chasing America shows us the best and worst that America offers to a Black man--from the Jim Crow South to boarding school life in New England to backstage at the Fillmore East to a holding cell in Bellevue Hospital.
Part Ellison, part Exley, Chasing America is an amazing story.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dennis Watlington has been a junkie, a thief, a motivational speaker, a janitor for the circus, an occupational therapist, a journalist, a soap opera actor, and most recently a screenwriter and documentary filmmaker. His credits include The Untold Story of the Black West which won him an Emmy. He currently lives with his wife Anne in Western Massachusetts.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Dennis Watlington is not your typical Black man. Chasing America is his story of walking the tightrope of American racial politics and finding acceptance always elusive.

"Chasing America is an epic tale of the black experience in late 20th century America. Author Dennis Watlington has seen it all, and makes no excuses for his addictions, petty crimes and squandered opportunities, but the soul-crushing racism that surrounds him speaks for itself as he makes his way from Harlem and the Deep South on into the larger, white-run world. The life he ends up creating--as a husband and father, as a playwright, actor and writer, and as a friend who never forgets the old neighborhood--are a tribute to his innate decency, his sheer talent and his inspiring capacity for self-renewal." -Beth Harpaz, author of Finding Annie Farrell

"Chasing America covers many topics from drug addiction, sex, interracial marriages, racism to redemption. Dennis Watlington's experience is a good example of how God deals with us as individuals." -Armstrong Williams

Aus dem Klappentext

"And I thought I knew this crazy-brave black boy who bolted out of a Harlem ghetto into a white prep school and bobbed and weaved his way across the treacherous divide between black and white America. But Dennis Watlington's life story is even more astonishing than I knew. He emerges a no-jive black integrationist who is proud of the slave ancestry that makes him a solid American foreperson." Gail Sheehy, bestselling author of Passages and Understanding Men's Passages
Chasing America is a rollercoaster ride through promise and poverty, affirmative action and addiction, and a powerful story that captures a life and an era that is seminally American.
Born in Harlem in 1952, Dennis developed a heroin habit at the age of 14, kicked it, and received a scholarship to the Hotchkiss School where he was elected president of his class. He went on to NYU, became involved in film and theater (he had a small role in The Deerhunter and gave Bruce Willis his start in a play called Bullpen), got addicted to crack, kicked that, and became an Emmy winning television writer.
Chasing America shows us the best and worst that America offers to a Black man from the Jim Crow South to boarding school life in New England to backstage at the Fillmore East to a holding cell in Bellevue Hospital.
Part Ellison, part Exley, Chasing America is an amazing story.

Rezensionen

Watlington was a poor African-American boy in LBJ-era New York City whose intellectual acuity landed him scholarships to several prestigious prep school programs as the "token Negro," including the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. But the street lured him back; he became addicted to heroin at 13, was in gangs at 15 and incarcerated at 17. Later he was tempted by alcohol and crack cocaine. Watlington's healing came through acting, teaching and knowing the right women: his first wife, African-American actress Gerri Griffin; their daughter, Avery; his Caucasian wife of the past two decades, Anne; the Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple; and his lifelong friend, Gail Sheehy, who'd written about him when he was at Hotchkiss. Watlington views his childhood, adolescence and rise as a television writer and screenwriter through the scrim of racism. His tale is remarkable, if incomplete (his father and siblings are rarely mentioned, his mother appears only as a vicious harridan, he never explains why he chooses drugs and crime, he glosses over his successes), and the overabundance of colloquial slang and the excessive use of "nigger" make for hard going. Nevertheless, it's a compelling story of one man's struggle to define his place as a black man in white America. (Feb. 15)
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Verlag
Thomas Dunne Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312271891
ISBN 13 
9780312271893
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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