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Maybe someday
35
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
3/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Maud Newton
Publisher:
Random House
Date:
March 29, 2022
A writer researches her genealogyâher grandfather's marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors' roles in slavery and genocideâand seeks family secrets through her DNA while meditating on the meanings and politics of familial inheritance.
What The Reviewers Say
Who am I? is the question troubling Maud Newton in her extraordinary and wide-ranging book.
We look to family trees perhaps because of an interest in history, but ultimately because we want to know more about ourselves. Newton starts with a similar curiosity but quickly moves to more interesting questions. How much of what is inherited is inescapable? What is nature, and what is nurture?.
Newton’s beautiful and complexly nuanced Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation...brings her astute mind and her engaging writing style to explore why people are so intrigued by what they find in their ancestral past, and whether recent findings in genetics support notions of inheriting the temperaments or intellectual or athletic gifts of our forbears.
Such exquisite care is threaded subtly through all Newton’s pages.
