cover image Mixed Blessing

Mixed Blessing

Doris McMillon. St. Martin's Press, $14.95 (247pp) ISBN 978-0-312-53527-8

McMillon, a famous television newscaster, describes the emotional background of the 1981 headlined reunion with her biological mother, Josefine Reiser, who gave her up for adoption 30 years before because ""it wasn't in the best interests of a white German woman to have a brown baby.'' Throughout a stormy adolescence in the United States with her black adoptive parents, whose often violent marrige, she writes, affected her emotional development, McMillon entertained fantasties about her natural mother. Despite success in career and marriage, her need to find the mother who had seemingly abandoned her became obsessive, ending in a search that resulted in even more ambiguity. Frank in language and judgment, McMillon's story is told in the vein of pop psychology. November 5