I attended a book reading on Friday night at my local bookstore, Book Court, in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The event: The launch of The Skin Between Us, a memoir by Kym Ragusa of growing up in Harlem to an Italian-American father and an African-American mother and the social and racial stresses and strains that caused members of these families to come together and fall apart and then make it work.

It's a beautifully written work that encapsulates all that is most challenging and enriching about living within and among diversity and difference. That the book is so closely and intimately observed is perhaps not surprising, given the author is a documentary filmmaker.