Books, Arts & Manners: Tree of Lives

Family, by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus, 386 pp., $23)

Researching your family tree can be a more melancholy exercise than you might think. If your ancestors turn out to be considerably worse than you, that’s depressing; or if they turn out to be better, it can be a kind of rebuke. Around the same time I was reading Ian Frazier’s gently sad history of his family, I was also reading an H. P. Lovecraft story, “Shadow over Innsmouth,” about an

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.

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Family, by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus, 386 pp., $23)

Researching your family tree can be a more melancholy exercise than you might think. If your ancestors turn out to be considerably worse than you, that’s depressing; or if they turn out to be better, it can be a kind of rebuke. Around the same time I was reading Ian Frazier’s gently sad history of his family, I was also reading an H. P. Lovecraft story, “Shadow over Innsmouth,” about an

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.