Skinfolk: A Memoir

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.