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Chargement... Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree - The Search for My Melungeon Ancestorspar Lisa Alther
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. This is the first book of Lisa Alther's I've read, it won't be the last. This book is full of well researched facts, and Lisa's view of life is very enjoyable. ( ) ....woman searches for her DNA ancestry in Appalachia and discovers roots to Portugal, Jewish, Native American heritage - which is not expected since her family culturally identify as Scottish protestant. I love the way this is written and the humor. It reads so quickly and comes across as an honest re-telling of her experience at each step of the way. It helps me to find surprises and interesting turns in my own DNA ancestry - and that there is no need to try and figure out "how" or "why" information got lost...just focus on your own findings and mostly this brings joy and satisfaction. And for Lisa Alther -a book! I initially picked up this book because there was a review by Doris Lessing and so I knew it had to be good. I was concerned about reading a memoir that was going to drag me into the mud of someone else's confusion (claiming universal insight along the way); but nope! This was enjoyable, fun, and i definitely recommend to others to read this book. I picked this up almost reflexively, after all, I've loved Alther's fiction and I'm a big fan of the memoir. However, this meandering philosophical search for Alther's genetic heritage didn't suit me at all. To be fair, I do have a dog in this particular hunt. I suspect that because my own child's parentage will always be 50% unknowable mystery, I bristle a little when people assign importance to ancestry. I tend to err on the side of who you are does matter and who your ancestors were doesn't, so once Alther began to explain how hugely important knowing particulars of her heritage is to her, she began to lose me. I found much of the book to be wildly discursive and only intermittently interesting. It just wasn't for me, though I think that the more genealogically inclined would dig it. The subtitle of this book is misleading. It is really more of a memoir/travelogue with only tangential connection to the whole question of Melungeon ancestry. Toward the last quarter of the book that topic becomes more prevalent, but the main theme is identity: ethnic and regional. If you are looking for a lot of material on the genealogy of the Melungeons, you will be disappointed. If you are looking for an entertaining and witty memoir that is quick and easy to read, you will not be disappointed. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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Most of us grow up knowing who we are and where we come from. Lisa Alther's mother hailed from New York, her father from Virginia. One day a babysitter told Lisa about the Melungeons: six-fingered child-snatchers who hid in caves. Forgetting about these creepy kidnappers until she had a daughter of her own, Lisa learned they were actually an isolated group of dark-skinned people--often with extra thumbs--living in East Tennessee. But who were they? Descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony? Kin of shipwrecked Portuguese or Turkish sailors? Or were they the children of frontiersman, or displaced Native Americans? Part sidesplitting travelogue, part how (and how not) to climb your family tree, Alther's Kinfolks casts light on a little-known part of America's contentious racial history; it shimmers with wicked humor, dazzles with wit, and demonstrates just how wacky and wonderful our human family truly is. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.5Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th CenturyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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