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.

Genealogy is a national obsession right now, and there’s no shortage of books about the family revelations uncovered by research and DNA testing. But genealogical accounts are almost always inward-looking exercises; few writers can offer a tale as riveting and timely as Maud Newton does in Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation. This is testament not only to her lyrical writing and wide-ranging scholarship but to the story told by her family tree — one of profound intergenerational racism intertwined with the worst moments of American history.

... her vigorous book Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation deepens her investigation of both family lore (her maternal grandfather is rumored to have married 13 times, once to a woman who shot him in the gut) and our broader preoccupation with our forebears.

... a passionate memoir and investigation of inheritance and bloodlines.

This is rich material for a soul-searching memoir, but in Ancestor Trouble, Newton aims for more than an accounting of family secrets. She surveys and synthesizes what we know today about inheritance, a wealth of new knowledge derived from the sequencing of the human genome and the explosion of genetic research that followed.

... a revealing family memoir with a well-researched and thoughtful exploration of heredity and genealogy.

An engaging and thoroughly researched memoir relaying a family history that is at turns recognizable and abhorrent, as an honest and typical history of American exceptionalism, racism, and misogyny. Will appealing to lovers of memoirs, family secrets, genealogy, and the sociological makeup threading U.S. history..

In exploring her own background, Newton investigates current theories regarding DNA analysis, inherited trauma, and psychological profiling with Sherlockian verve and an academician’s tenacity. Genealogy sleuths often undertake such quests hoping to discover hidden gems buried deep in those census records, such as a direct link to aristocracy or a Founding Father. Newton is just looking for some peace of mind, and her approach may help others realize what a worthy goal that is..

Newton debuts with a masterful mix of memoir and cultural criticism that wrestles with America’s ancestry through her own family’s complex past.

... a comprehensive work combining personal narrative and reporting.