Review
Jenniemae & James is a smart and troubling memoir of bigotry and generosity, darkness and light, intellectual virtuosity and untapped talent, revelation and silence. The story of a family, it also records the routine and crushing injustice of life in segregated America, and honors the love African American women gave the white children and families in their care.
Housekeeper Jenniemae Harrington was, "an underestimated, under-appreciated, extremely overweight woman who was very religious, dirt poor, and illiterate;" but it is Jenniemae's intelligence, grit, faith and love that hold the Newman family together as ambition, depression, illness, narcissism, resentment, infidelity, secrecy, or just small daily disasters threaten to destroy it:
"On any given day separation or divorce was a real possibility... The...
Beyond the Book
Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real 'wow, that's big,' time... Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.
- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Most of us can get our head around what a million looks like, but visualizing a billion, let alone a trillion can be challenging.
The image to the left is what a billion dollars...
