Books
McBride is best known for his 1996 memoir, the bestselling The Color of Water, which describes his life growing up in a large, poor African American family led by a white, religious, and strict Jewish mother, whose father was an Orthodox rabbi, but converted and became devoutly Christian during her first marriage to Andrew McBride.
"I thought it would be received well in the black community but it's sold much better in the white Jewish community," he said. "Most of my readers are middle-age, white, Jewish women...."
The memoir spent over two years on The New York Times bestseller list, and now appears on high school and university course lists across America.
In 2002, he published a novel, Miracle at St. Anna, drawing on the history of the overwhelmingly African American 92nd Infantry Division in the Italian campaign from mid-1944 to April 1945. The book was adapted into the movie Miracle at St. Anna, directed by Spike Lee, released on September 26, 2008.
In 2005, he published the first volume of The Process, a CD-based documentary about life as lived by low-profile jazz musicians.
In 2008, McBride uses the notorious criminal Patty Cannon as a villain in his novel Song Yet Sung.
Read more about this topic: James Mc Bride (writer)
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“Only in books the flat and final happens,
Only in dreams we meet and interlock....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“In books one finds golden mansions and women as beautiful as jewels.”
—Chinese proverb.
“There was books too.... One was “Pilgrim’s Progress,” about a man that left his family it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)