Forest Whitaker, the fourth Black man to receive an Academy Award, did not always know he wanted to act. First came music and then football. In 1979, Whitaker began his studies at Cal State Polytechnic University, Pomona, on a football scholarship but was haunted by persistent back trouble....
What touched me most, besides the beauty of the sentences, were the layers of meaning. The book’s epigraph is Ovid’s narration of Vertumnus, the seasonal shapeshifter who loves only Pomona; Vertumnus shows up later on as a metaphor for consciousness, “universal by dint of being irreducib...