TVNewser stopped by a book party last night for CNN EVP Mark Whitaker, held at the Upper West Side apartment of HBO Video President Henry McGee and his wife, Celia. (HBO and CNN are both owned by Time Warner.) Whitaker’s family memoir, My Long Trip Home, will be released Tuesday.
In a room packed with colleagues and friends — people he called his “journalistic families” from stints at Newsweek, NBC and CNN — Whitaker (pictured here with his wife, Alexis Gelber) chronicled the experience of writing the memoir, which tells the story of his parents, an interracial couple who met in the 1950s.
“What really got me going and kept me going was not so much writing from memory, which I started to do at the beginning,” he said. “But when I realized that there were a lot of gaps in the story that needed to be filled, and I started to report. And it was really the reporting of the story that I became obsessed with.”
See who else was at the party after the jump.
NBC’s Brian Williams, Mark Whitaker, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien
CNN’s EVP Ken Jautz, Ali Velshi, and SVP of Programming Bart Feder
Henry McGee, Mark Whitaker, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes
CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, Ali Velshi and Katherine Green
(Photos: Lorenzo Bevilaqua / CNN)