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Title: Family
ISBN: 0312420595
Author:
Ian Frazier
Publicate Date: 2002-02-09
Publish: 2002-02-09
List Price: $16.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $0.50
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $0.01
Amazon Merchant Price: $15.30
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1: A great read
The author blends his own family legacy into larger themes that apply to us all. He addresses the legacy of his own family in a way that is applicable to all of us. Very tender, but also practical and a little bit shocking, like most family histories at least should be.
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2: The Frazier family
I think it's Frazier's style that is the most attractive thing about this book. He writes in simple declarative sentences with little embellishment - exactly the way someone would tell you a story orally. No histrionics, no deep reflections - just straight facts, boom, boom. It works magnificently here.
He tells a history of his family (it's not really a memoir, at least not until the end, which is the weakest part), going back to his ancestors who first came to America. The best part I think is the first half; Frazier is very interested in the Civil War and spends a lot of time tracing relatives as they fought with the 55th Ohio Volunteer Infantry and the 11th Corps. (He goes way off on a tangent writing about Stonewall Jackson; it's interesting but probably could have been edited out.)
Commendable is his willingness to reveal some not very pleasant things about his relatives at times: prejudices, job failings, embarrassments - things that other writers would have kept secret. Unfortunately, as his family history becomes more contemporary he comes across as more self-serving: I felt suddenly that he was writing more for himself than for his audience. An excellent first half, though - and that style is terrific.
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3: Life's too short for this book.
Ian Frazier is a good writer--let's get that straight. The downfall of this book is not how he writes but what he writes about. I wasn't bored out of my mind reading this book, but it just didn't do anything for me. I like to read books that move me and this book had a cruising speed of 0-1 mph. This book is a generational playback/story about his family. I often thought how amazing it was that the author could write in a way to sound like he was speaking to the reader and to keep me (just barely) reading on to the next page. This was sllooowwww reading and I thought, "with all the books out there, I am just wasting my time reading about something I really couldn't care less about. There was nothing too fascinating about his family story. (At least to the point where I finally quit---about 1/2 way) I would never ever recommend this book. I would recommend sitting comatose in front of the tv watching really bad sitcoms over reading this book.
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4: 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.
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5: A People's History of the United States
Frazier's gifts as a writer shine in this climb through his family tree. Deadpan, folksy, soulful, urbane, Frazier captures the complexities of his family's unique history within the context of our country's history. Lots of real people and their small eccentricities. The negative editorial reviews reflect a collective missing of the boat. "On the Rez" is another great Frazier book.
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