FuturefaceFutureface
a Family Mystery, An Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging
Title rated 3.55 out of 5 stars, based on 27 ratings(27 ratings)
Book, 2018
Current format, Book, 2018, 1st ed, Available .Book, 2018
Current format, Book, 2018, 1st ed, Available . Offered in 0 more formatsAlex Wagner has always been fascinated by stories of exile and migration. Her father's ancestors immigrated to the United States from Ireland and Luxembourg. Her mother fled Rangoon in the 1960s, escaping Burma's military dictatorship. In her professional life, Wagner reported from the Arizona-Mexico border, where agents, drones, cameras, and military hardware guarded the line between two nations. She listened to debates about whether the United States should be a melting pot or a salad bowl. She knew that moving from one land to another--and the accompanying recombination of individual and tribal identities--was the story of America. And she was happy that her own mixed-race ancestry and late twentieth-century education had taught her that identity is mutable and meaningless, a thing we make rather than a thing we are. When a cousin's offhand comment threw a mystery into her personal story--introducing the possibility of an exciting new twist in her already complex family history--Wagner was suddenly awakened to her own deep hunger to be something, to belong, to have an identity that mattered, a tribe of her own. So she set off on a quest to find the truth about her family history, which took her from Burma to Luxembourg, from ruined colonial capitals with records written on banana leaves to Mormon databases and high-tech genetic labs. As she gets closer to solving the mystery of her own ancestry, she begins to grapple with a deeper question: Does it matter? Is our enduring obsession with blood and land, race and identity, worth all the trouble it's caused us? The answers can be found in this deeply personal account of her search for belonging, a meditation on the things that define us as insiders and outsiders and make us think in terms of "us" and "them."
Title availability
Find this title on
MOBIUSAbout
Subject and genre
Details
Publication
- New York : Oneworld, .2018.
Opinion
More from the community
Community lists featuring this title
There are no community lists featuring this title
Community contributions
There are no quotations from this title
There are no quotations from this title
From the community