Brooke Newman

Not sure why the title is "Jenniemae & James" when most of the book is about James, somewhat about Ruth (author's mother), and even less about Jenniemae.

Pages and pages of dialogue from conversations that occurred 50 years ago, that the author admits are recreated from her imagination. Long excerpts from all sorts of things her father wrote - letters to the editor, books, speeches, etc.

Author didn't seem to have much insight into her parents, Jenniemae, or herself. Book is filled with rambling passages of redundant sentiments that didn't illuminate anything particularly interesting.… (more)

Jenniemae and James is Brooke Newman’s homage to the civil rights-era friendship between her Jewish father, James Newman (mathematician, renowned author, and coiner of "googol" aka "google"), and their African-American housekeeper, Jenniemae Harrington (whose interest in numbers involved an underground lottery).

It’s also a memoir of Brooke’s childhood household in Washington DC with her older brother; their beautiful but psychologically unstable mother, Ruth; the brilliant, moody and philandering James (whose lovers sometimes lived in the house and became friends with Ruth); and the stabilizing influence of Jenniemae, the sixth of twelve children born to Alabama sharecroppers.

The narrative is rose-colored, uneven and repetitive, and an Author’s Note acknowledges the (necessarily) imagined nature of the dialogue from Brooke’s childhood. But readers who put that aside will be satisfied by its passages about James’s work (including his colleague, Dr. Einstein), cold-war politics, race relations … and its real-life, The Help-like premise.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)… (more)