Divided to the Vein: A Journey Into Race and Family

``I couldn't love myself if I hated my own flesh and blood,'' declares Minerbrook, a black journalist for U.S. News & World Report, explaining his effort to reconnect with his white maternal grandmother, who cut off her daughter when she married a black man. When he visited her Missouri farm town in an attempt to see her, he was thwarted; a year later, he found grace in a reunion. His book encompasses those stories and the larger stories of his parents' paths and his own troubled upbringing. His father's family were bourgeois strivers; his mother's family was long shamed by poverty. His parents' marriage was stormy, even violent; as a youth, after a move to suburbia, Minerbrook pursued both studies and sports as a way to fit, uneasily, with both whites and blacks. At Harvard, he felt personal liberation, even as he felt discomfort among the comformingly nationalist fellow black students. There he embraced Orwell, whose works ``encouraged me to be honest with myself''; such honesty, infused with both passion and a spirit of forgiveness, animates this memorable book. Photos. Author tour. (Jan.)