Jo McDougall brings a poet's sensibility to memoir. Recounting five generations of Delta rice farmers, through family archives and oral histories, she traces how the clan made their way into the fabric of America, beginning with her Belgian-immigrant grandfather, a pioneer rice farmer on the Arkansas Delta at the turn of the twentieth century. As John Grisham has for a 1950s Arkansas cotton farm, McDougall illuminates an Arkansas rice farm in the 1930s and 1940s. The Garot family's acreage near DeWitt and the town itself provide the stage for McDougall's wry, compelling, and layered account of the day-to-day of rice growing on the farm that her father inherited. In that setting she discovers a rich "universe of words" in the Great Depression, comes of age during World War II, and finds her way alongside "that whole quirky, compelling cast of characters" that comprised her kin. In this conflicted, ironic, southern-but-universal account of betrayal, heartbreak, loss, and joy, "the vagaries and the grace" of the land join forces with the power of money as family bonds are both forged and dissolved. Deeply felt, unsentimental, and often humorous,Daddy's Money presents McDougall's life and the lives of her relatives in the way that all our lives are eventually framed-as stories. "When all else is lost," the author maintains, "the stories remain."

A daughter of freed African American slaves, Daisy Turner became a living repository of history. The family narrative entrusted to her--"a well-polished artifact, an heirloom that had been carefully preserved"--began among the Yoruba in West Africa and continued with her own century and more of life.
 
In 1983, folklorist Jane Beck began a series of interviews with Turner, then one hundred years old and still relating four generations of oral history. Beck uses Turner's storytelling to build the Turner family saga, using at its foundation the oft-repeated touchstone stories at the heart of their experiences: the abduction into slavery of Turner's African ancestors; Daisy's father Alec Turner learning to read; his return as a soldier to his former plantation to kill his former overseer; and Daisy's childhood stand against racism. Other stories re-create enslavement and her father's life in Vermont--in short, the range of life events large and small, transmitted by means so alive as to include voice inflections. Beck, at the same time, weaves in historical research and offers a folklorist's perspective on oral history and the hazards--and uses--of memory.

Publication of this book is supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Folklore Fund.

Carolyn Wilkins grew up defending her racial identity. Because of her light complexion and wavy hair, she spent years struggling to convince others that she was black. Her family’s prominence set Carolyn’s experiences even further apart from those of the average African American. Her father and uncle were well-known lawyers who had graduated from Harvard Law School. Another uncle had been a child prodigy and protégé of Albert Einstein. And her grandfather had been America's first black assistant secretary of labor.

Carolyn's parents insisted she follow the color-conscious rituals of Chicago's elite black bourgeoisie—experiences Carolyn recalls as some of the most miserable of her entire life. Only in the company of her mischievous Aunt Marjory, a woman who refused to let the conventions of “proper” black society limit her, does Carolyn feel a true connection to her family's African American heritage.

When Aunt Marjory passes away, Carolyn inherits ten bulging scrapbooks filled with family history and memories. What she finds in these photo albums inspires her to discover the truth about her ancestors—a quest that will eventually involve years of research, thousands of miles of travel, and much soul-searching.

Carolyn learns that her great-grandfather John Bird Wilkins was born into slavery and went on to become a teacher, inventor, newspaperman, renegade Baptist minister, and a bigamist who abandoned five children. And when she discovers that her grandfather J. Ernest Wilkins may have been forced to resign from his labor department post by members of the Eisenhower administration, Carolyn must confront the bittersweet fruits of her family's generations-long quest for status and approval.

Damn Near White is an insider’s portrait of an unusual American family. Readers will be drawn into Carolyn’s journey as she struggles to redefine herself in light of the long-buried secrets she uncovers. Tackling issues of class, color, and caste, Wilkins reflects on the changes of African American life in U.S. history through her dedicated search to discover her family’s powerful story.

"Every writer has advice for aspiring writers. Mine is predicated on formative years spent cleaning my father’s calf pens: Just keep shoveling until you’ve got a pile so big, someone has to notice. The fact that I cast my life’s work as slung manure simply proves that I recognize an apt metaphor when I accidentally stick it with a pitchfork. . . . Poetry was my first love, my gateway drug—still the poets are my favorites—but I quickly realized I lacked the chops or insights to survive on verse alone. But I wanted to write. Every day. And so I read everything I could about freelancing, and started shoveling." 

The pieces gathered within this book draw on fifteen years of what Michael Perry calls "shovel time"—a writer going to work as the work is offered. The range of subjects is wide, from musky fishing, puking, and mountain-climbing Iraq War veterans to the frozen head of Ted Williams. Some assignments lead to self-examination of an alarming magnitude (as Perry notes, "It quickly becomes obvious that I am a self-absorbed hypochondriac forever resolving to do better nutritionally and fitness-wise but my follow-through is laughable.") But his favorites are those that allow him to turn the lens outward: "My greatest privilege," he says, "lies not in telling my own story; it lies in being trusted to tell the story of another."

A radically open interrogation of queer Chicano identity
 
In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day's Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker’s world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker’s initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one’s very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.

Day of Our Lives is equal parts social history and memoir documenting the unraveling of a marriage against the backdrop of the shifting social mores of 1960s and ’70s America. Joan Aleshire’s speaker, a young wife, enters marriage gratefully, even eagerly, believing it to be “a long table / with friends crowding in, red wine / in tumblers.” Motherhood follows, but so do infidelities and reconciliation and ultimately divorce. With each hard knock, the speaker sheds a little more of her innocence as she gains awareness of her power as both a woman and a writer: “Coming home / late from a festival for women / where I’d said all the things / the audience liked, I slipped / into bed so flush with triumph / my husband recoiled from the heat.”

In August 1914, Russia entered World War I, and with it, the imperial family of Tsar Nicholas II was thrust into a conflict they would not survive. His eldest child, Olga Nikolaevna, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, had begun a diary in 1905 when she was ten years old and kept writing her thoughts and impressions of day-to-day life as a grand duchess until abruptly ending her entries when her father abdicated his throne in March 1917. Held at the State Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow, Olga’s diaries during the wartime period have never been translated into English until this volume. At the outset of the war, Olga and her sister Tatiana worked as nurses in a military hospital along with their mother, Tsarina Alexandra. Olga’s younger sisters, Maria and Anastasia, visited the infirmaries to help raise the morale of the wounded and sick soldiers. The strain was indeed great, as Olga records her impressions of tending to the officers who had been injured and maimed in the fighting on the Russian front. Concerns about her sickly brother, Aleksei, abound, as well those for her father, who is seen attempting to manage the ongoing war. Gregori Rasputin appears in entries, too, in an affectionate manner as one would expect of a family friend. While the diaries reflect the interests of a young woman, her tone grows increasingly serious as the Russian army suffers setbacks, Rasputin is ultimately murdered, and a popular movement against her family begins to grow. At the point Olga ends her writing in 1917, the author continues the story by translating letters and impressions from family intimates, such as Anna Vyrubova, as well as the diary kept by Nicholas II himself. Finally, once the imperial family has been put under house arrest by the revolutionaries, we follow events through observations by Alexander Kerensky, head of the initial Provisional Government, these too in English translation for the first time. Olga would offer no further personal writings, as she and the rest of her family were crowded into the basement of a house in the Urals and shot to death in July 1918.

The Diary of Olga Romanov: Royal Witness to the Russian Revolution, translated and introduced by scientist and librarian Helen Azar, and supplemented with additional primary source material, is a remarkable document of a young woman who did not choose to be part of a royal family and never exploited her own position, but lost her life simply because of what her family represented.

Discovered in a smokehouse in the mid-1980s, the diary of Serepta Jordan provides a unique window into the lives of Confederates living in occupied territory in upper middle Tennessee. A massive tome, written in a sturdy store ledger, the diary records every day from the fall of 1857 to June 1864. In this abridged version, Jordan reports local news, descriptions of her daily activities, war news, and social life. Orphaned at twelve, Jordan—her first name shortened to “Rep” by family and friends—lived in bustling New Providence (now part of Clarksville), Tennessee, on the banks of the Red River. Well educated by private tutors, Jordan read widely, followed politics, and  was a skilled seamstress interested in the latest fashions.

Jordan’s descendants worked tirelessly toward ensuring the publication of this diary. In its carefully annotated pages, readers will learn about the years of sectional conflict leading up to the war, the diarist’s dizzying array of daily activities, and her attitudes toward those she encountered. Jordan takes a caustic tone toward Union occupiers, whom she accused of “prancing round on their fine horses.” She routinely refers to the USA as “Lincolndom” and describes her contempt toward the African Americans in the blue uniforms of the Union army. She seems to have also harbored a bitter resentment toward the “elites” on the other side of the river in Clarksville. This one-of-a-kind volume not only adds a distinct female voice to the story of the Civil War, but also a unique new picture of the slow but steady disintegration of the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

The Divine Institution provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. This tradition inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sexual identities that ground the nuclear family. The consequences of this theology are both personal suffering for individuals who cannot measure up to prescribed gender and sexual roles, and political support for conservative government policies. Exposure to experiences that undermine the idea that an emphasis on the family is the solution to all social problems is causing a younger generation of white evangelicals to shift away from this narrow theological emphasis and toward a more social justice-oriented theology. The material and political effects of this shift remain to be seen.

What if your father had Alzheimer's disease? And what if there was a test to tell you if, as you grew older, you might develop it, too? Would you have the test? And if you did, how would the results affect the way you live your life? How would they affect your family? Your job? Your medical insurance?

Breast cancer, sickle-cell anemia, Huntington disease, muscular dystrophy--every day, people have to face the fact that a hereditary disorder runs in their family. The painful knowledge that they or their children might be at risk for a genetic disorder influences all their decisions about the future. They ask, "Is there a genetic test to let us know if we are really at risk? If there is such a test, do we really want to have it done?"

For an ever-growing number of disorders, testing is possible--but the existence of a test can raise new and troubling questions. In this book, geneticist and science policy expert Doris Teichler Zallen explains clearly and sympathetically how genetic disorders are passed along in families; which hereditary disorders can be tested for using genetic technology; how the new DNA tests for genetic disorders work; what genetic tests can and can't reveal, and why the tests often do not give clear-cut answers; what questions one should ask doctors and genetic counselors; how the health care system, government policies, and insurance companies influence our options; and what the resources are for obtaining more information and counseling.

Through the stories of real families and the choices they made about genetic testing, Zallen helps readers think through their own alternatives and discuss them with relatives. Does it Run in the Family? is essential reading for every family coping with inherited medical conditions and for the medical and genetics professionals involved in their decisions. It will also interest all readers who seek a clear explanation of the new DNA tests and the issues surrounding them.

     In Dolor y Alegría (Sorrow and Joy), fifteen mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca speak about the dramatic effects that urbanization and rapid social change have had on their lives.  Sarah LeVine deftly combines these autobiographical vignettes with ethnographic material, survey findings, and her own observations.  The result is a vivid picture of contrast and continuity.
     While many earlier publications have focused on the poor of Latin America who live at the margins of urban life, Dolor y Alegría explores the experiences of ordinary working and lower-middle class women, most of them transplants from villages and small towns to a densely populated city neighborhood.  In their early years, many experienced family disruption, emotional deprivation, and economic hardship; but steadily increasing educational opportunities, improved health care, and easily available contraception have significantly altered how the younger women relate to their families and the larger society.
     Today’s Mexican schoolgirl, LeVine shows, is encouraged to apply herself to her studies for her own benefit, and the longer she remains in school, the greater the self-confidence she will carry with her into the world of work and later into marriage and motherhood.  Hard economic times have forced many married women into the workplace where their sense of personal efficacy is enhanced; at the same time, in the domestic sphere, their earnings allow them greater negotiating power with husbands and male relatives.  Changes are not confined to the younger generation.  Older women are enjoying better health and living longer; but with adult children either less able or willing to accept responsibility for aged parents than they were in the past, anxiety runs high and family relations are often strained.
     Dolor y Alegría takes a close look at the efforts of three generations of Mexican women to redefine themselves in both family and workplace; it shows that today’s young woman has very different expectations of herself and others from those that her grandmother or even her mother had.

“Many memories, many myths”—this is how Wendy Doniger begins the story of her parents’ origins in Europe and sharply bifurcated life in America. Recalling their contrasting attitudes toward Judaism and religion in general—and acknowledging the mythologized narratives that keep bubbling up in those recollections—Doniger tells the story of their childhoods, their unusual marriage, their life in the post–World War II Jewish enclave of Great Neck, New York, and her own complex relationship with each of them.

n telling the story of five generations of her family and its farm in the Arkansas Delta, Margaret Jones Bolsterli brings together her own research, historical perspective, and family lore as it reaches her from the days of her great-grandfather down to her nephew. The result is a family saga that is at once universal and personal, historical and timeless. During Wind and Rain moves from the land’s acquisition in 1848 through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1927 Flood, the Great Depression, and the drought of 1930 to the modern considerations of mechanization, fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. The transformation of dense swamp and forest to today’s commercial agriculture is the story of two hundred acres worked by people sowing their fate with sweat, ingenuity, and luck. From the hoes of Bolsterli’s great-grandfather Uriah’s time to her nephew Casey’s machinery capable of cultivating an acre in five minutes, During Wind and Rain poignantly portrays five generations of farmers motivated by dreams of “a crop so good that the memory of it can warm the drafty floors of adversity for the rest of one's life.”