The obsession of the novel's characters with degrees of skin colour, or the lack thereof, threatens to force the heroine, a near-white black, to call off her planned marriage to a white jazz musician and instead to encourage the crude advances of a nut-brown man with three daughters.

ECONOMIST: Dorothy West

But she is such a talented artist and her black-and-white drawings are so captivating, it seems wrong to call her memoir a comic book.

NPR: More Recommendations

We want to see black, white, good, bad, and we want to make a judgment call because we're smart, intelligent people.

NPR: Chertoff Brings Reality Check to '24' Crew