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A Family of Strangers by Deborah Tall Enter your email address below and seven days a week a new review will arrive in your mail. Email address: Click here to read about Powells.com's privacy policy. A Family's Secret History A review by Ryan Van Meter Deborah Tall begins A Family of Strangers, her "lyric essay-cum-memoir," by measuring life's certainty against its mystery. On the first page, she lists "What I know," on the second, "What I don't yet know." Then she attempts to bridge the gulf between the two. Hers is a strenuous effort, often painful, and since it leads to much less than full knowledge, the story of her search becomes the story of this book, as we watch Tall struggle, with what meager knowledge she can gain, to unlock a family history that has been kept from her deliberately. The past she wants so desperately to open belongs to her father -- the same man responsible for closing it off. Even by the memoir's conclusion, Tall won't fully understand the choices that led him -- a radar expert who worked on the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System and who could disappear for months at a time -- to hide so much of himself and his roots. He seemed strangely perfect for his highly-classified occupation because, first ... Read the entire review More reviews from The Iowa Review

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade by Ann Fessler

I was born in 1971 to an unwed mother, and so reading The Girls Who Went Away prompted the discovery that my mother might have been such a girl, one who went away -- from me, forever, and I from her. My mother wouldn't have been sent away easily; she was a participant in radical politics and a...

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[Ed. note: This review discusses three books, My Detachment, Gods of Tin: The Flying Years, and One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer.] If journalism is the first rough draft of history, the hastily written memoir may be the second. Judging by the number of such memoirs that have...

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Dubravka Ugrešić's latest novel, The Ministry of Pain, is the story of Tanja Lucić, an exile from Yugoslavia who ends up teaching at the University of Amsterdam. Tanja's job (teaching Yugoslav Literature at the Department of Slavonic Languages) proves completely bizarre: she is supposed to teach ...

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