Dancing with Strangers: a Memoir by Watkins, Mel - 1998

New York: Simon & Schuster. New in Near Fine dust jacket. 1998. First Edition. Hardcover. Arresting prose and a provocative conclusion - challenging the idea that our destinies are fundamentally linked to race - distinguish this remarkable memoir of growing up black in the American Midwest in the turbulent 1950s and 1960s. Set in an Ohio steel town and an exclusive, upstate New York private university, Dancing with Strangers is an evocative remembrance of an American's coming of age during the decade preceding the sixties' revolutionary transformation of American society. A dramatic, novelistically rendered account, it is the story of an individual's triumphant struggle for personal identity during an era when conformity, class, race, and political xenophobia dominated the American landscape. There is an approximate 1" narrow black remainder mark on the bottom of the book. 320 pages. The jacket has a tiny tear at the spine bottom. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. .