Product Description

Using letters and other family documents, Frazier reconstructs two hundred years of middle-class life, visiting small towns his ancestors lived in, reading books they read, and discovering the larger forces of history that affected them.He observes some of them during the Revolutionary War, he follows others west as they pioneer in the wilderness of Ohio and Indiana, and he visits the battlefields where they fought the Civil War.Family is a poetic epic of facts, a chronicle of Protestant culture's rise and fall, a memorial, and a revised view of American history as romantic as it is cold-eyed.AUTHORBIO: IAN FRAZIER lives in Montclair, New Jersey.His previous books include Great Plains, On the Rez, and Coyote v. Acme.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #679259 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

From Library Journal
Frazier, author of the best-selling Great Plains (Farrar, 1989), illuminates the recent history of this country by crisscrossing the nation to track down the names and stories of relatives as far back as his great-grandparents. Though at first the past seems as orderly as the listing of such simple details as births, marriages, and occupations, we soon move past now-peaceful graveyards to the roiled accounts of what real life was like for the people who joined the westward migration, fought in the Civil War, prospered in the oil boom, and suffered the untoward effects of progress. By weaving in his own circumstances as a young lad growing up heir to hardworking, pious traditions, Frazier converts what could have been merely a hearty retelling of popular history into a searching tale of parallels that solder together 130 years like links in the chain of life. This entrancing saga will resonate powerfully for readers reaching their middle years as the 20th century ends. Larger libraries may want multiple copies.
Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
From the author of the widely applauded Great Plains (1987), about a 24,000-mile van trip across the Midwest, comes another good book--but inconsistently so. Frazier writes about his family's past, and although some parts are fascinating, others are rather tedious. Readers will envy Frazier's extensive knowledge of his family history and his access to so much extant documentary evidence. He's done his research well, and he brings into his account of his family's ups and downs a substantial amount of background information on social, economic, and domestic history from colonial times to the present. We meet his progenitors on a personal level, hearing about how they grew up, courted, made a living, and died and about their individual achievements and disappointments. At times the narrative sweeps along with the drive and fluidity of fiction, but at other times, it descends into a mere recitation of facts that only family members would care about. Still, this is an effective illustration of the richness of history on the level of ordinary people who are neither kings nor presidents, and given the popularity of the author's previous book and his high profile as a regular contributor to the New Yorker, expect demand. Brad Hooper

From Kirkus Reviews
The grand sweep of American history is writ small in this family history/memoir by humorist Frazier (Great Plains, 1989, etc.). Frazier undertook this effort after his parents died in the late 1980s, to ``find a meaning that would defeat death.'' But his project seems more complicated and self-conscious, if not pretentious: an attempt to somehow reclaim American history for himself, a white Protestant. His preoccupation with his own religious doubt, contrasted with the firm faith of his ancestors- -whether German Reformed, Old School Presbyterian, or, like his great-great-grandfather Simeon Frazier, a member of the antiauthoritarian Disciples of Christ--culminates in a strange, reductionist review of American history as an expression of the decline of Protestant faith. More broadly, Frazier shares indiscriminately with us every detail he has been able to root out: from the momentous (the arrival of Thomas Benedict on these shores in 1638 and his descendant Platt Benedict's founding of Norwalk, Ohio) to the trivial (his great-great-uncle Charles's first attempt at fly-fishing and his grandmother's showing family pictures to Tennessee Williams in Key West). The quantity of information that could have rendered full-blooded portraits of long-ago generations is lacking; the lengthy catalogs often offered (trite entries from a great-grandfather's school diary, quotations from his parents' rather ordinary love letters) seem like fillers. The histories of the Fraziers, Wickhams, Benedicts, and Hurshes do follow the outlines of American history: the push west (all his relatives ended up in Ohio); the Civil War (Norwalk was a stop on the underground railroad); industrialization (his father became a chemist for Sohio). But Frazier's prose is flat as a prairie and his humor dry as stone. Only at the end, in interviews with two colorful relatives, and with the description of the deaths of his teenage brother Fritz from leukemia and of his parents, does the tale reach emotional heights. An object lesson in the pitfalls of writing a family history for anyone other than your family. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

My favorite, my absolute favorite
I've been thinking about this, and I've decided this is my favorite book, at least my favorite that I have read in the past 5 or 10 years.

It's pretty hard to say why, but let me give it a shot: the way his writing conveys his affection for his near family and his ancestors without losing his sense of humour about them. (Ian Frazier started out as a humor writer.) His beautiful descriptions of the countryside he travels through, country you might otherwise think was much worth looking at. His wonderful details about his family history make you feel like everyone's family is important.

Since I first read this book, I have developed a true genealogy fixation, trying to recapture the feeling Frazier invokes in this wonderful book. I wish he would write more.

One of the most moving books I know.
Many of the books I love, such as Carolyn See's "Making a Literary Life" and Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's "Italian Days," are as much about their authors as their stated subjects. Ian Frazier's "Family" also is highly personal, yet remarkable in how Frazier presents his memoirs of growing up in Ohio, adds a meticulously researched history of his ancestors, and conflates it all into a profoundly moving meditation on a country, a society and the human condition. "Family" is a book that you'll read from cover to cover without being able to put it down, then pick up often to dip into, savoring favorite parts and the rich, supple excellence of Frazier's prose. Always poignant but never sentimental, "Family" takes us through two hundred years of the lives of various Fraziers, Wickhams, Hurshes, Bachmans and Chapmans--the genealogy that culminated in David and Kate Frazier of Hudson, Ohio, their son Ian, and his four brothers and sisters. Frazier leads us off into far-ranging but fascinating and germane tangents: Discussing a Civil War skirmish in which his great-great-grandfather Charlie Wickham fought, Frazier goes off into the life story of the leader of the opposing forces in that skirmish--Stonewall Jackson. Throughout the book, Frazier shows an unerring eye for the telling detail that throws situations and personalities into dazzling focus. He also makes us love each and every one of the family members, past and present, that he writes about, and moves us to tears with his descriptions of the deaths of his father, his mother, and his young brother Fritz. Here is how Frazier describes his thoughts at his mother's deathbed: "(S)oon all the people who had accompanied me through life would be gone, too, and then even the people who had known us, and no one would remain on earth who had ever seen us, and those descended from us perhaps would know stories about us, perhaps once in a while they would pass by buildings where we had lived and they would mention that we had lived there. And then the stories would fade, and the graves would go untended, and no one would guess what it had been like to wake before dawn in our breath-warmed bedrooms as the radiators clanked and our wives and husbands and children slept." To read "Family" is to gain a fonder, fuller appreciation of our own families, and of all the blessed ties that bind.

A full year's reading and worth it.
Ian Frazier's Family is not a book that one reads at a sitting, but it is rather something to be savored over a long read. I have put nearly six months into reading it so far and am not the least bit bothered at my pace. While the book is ostensibly about Mr. Frazier's family, it is safer to say that it is really about the nature of family, particularly the American family. It is also a fascinating history of the country as seen through the lives of this family. Mr. Frazier has spent much time in gathering simply every piece of information that he can possible find about his family. There are more names in this book than one can hope to ever handle. But the tone, the flavor, and the rhythm of this piece make it an irresistable read.