Eartha & Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black & White, Kitt Shapiro & Patricia Weiss Levy

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Eartha & Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black and White
by Kitt Shapiro with Patricia Weiss Levy
Hardcover | May 4, 2021

Eartha & Kitt is a luminous, deeply personal memoir that explores the extraordinary bond between legendary performer Eartha Kitt and her daughter, Kitt Shapiro, offering an intimate portrait of love, identity, and resilience behind the spotlight.

Blending family memoir with cultural history, Shapiro recounts a childhood unlike any other. Raised while traveling the world with her famous mother, she experienced life both as an ordinary child and as the daughter of an international icon. Their relationship unfolds against the backdrop of fame, artistic ambition, and the complexities of race, as a Black mother and her light-skinned, blonde daughter navigated a society eager to define them both.

The book also revisits Eartha Kitt’s own early life, marked by extreme poverty in South Carolina, abandonment, and self-reinvention. From those beginnings, Eartha forged a career defined by independence, fearlessness, and refusal to conform, becoming a trailblazing artist whose influence spans music, film, Broadway, and television. Her unapologetic advocacy for racial justice, women’s rights, and LGBTQ equality made her both celebrated and controversial, and her legacy continues to resonate with new generations.

Through vivid storytelling and tender reflection, Shapiro brings her mother vividly to life, capturing Eartha’s love of nature, discipline, physical vitality, and radical self-honesty. Alongside the glamour and public persona, we see the private woman: devoted, demanding, fiercely loving, and deeply human.

Warm, wise, and emotionally rich, Eartha & Kitt is ultimately a love story between two remarkable women and a meditation on legacy, identity, and the power of staying true to oneself.

This title is a remainder, offered at half the original cover price. Remainder copies are new and unread, but may show minor shelf wear.