Reviews for Ancestors A Family History

The average rating for Ancestors A Family History based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-06-21 00:00:00 Matthew Dvorak The first half of this book lost me with the history of his family's involvement with the rise of the Christian Church movement. The second half, about his childhood and immediate relatives, was much more interesting and beautifully written. Many of the things he related I had already read in his fiction, so They Came Like Swallows and So Long, See You Tomorrow were mostly straight memory with a few fictional elements thrown in. Can't go higher than 3 stars because of having to slog through the first part of the book, which probably has a lot to do with my dislike of religious movements and men who set themselves up as saviors who must be followed.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-04-12 00:00:00 Jonathan Brawner This book is subtitled “A Family History” and at the point when Maxwell is reminiscing of Grandmother Maxwell, I was reminded of E.M. Forster’s Marianne Thornton, which is subtitled "A domestic biography." I then remembered I’d read of Maxwell and Welty discussing the Forster in their letters in What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell and went back to find this from Maxwell after he’d read the Forster: I finished the Forster book …with an extra special delight in his own reminiscences, especially that page about his friendship with the childish maid. It seemed to me that, with his usual characteristicness he had set about rectifying a residuum of injustice--There was more to be said in favor of those terrible people in Howard's [sic] End than it suited the purposes of that novel to say. But having taken a whole book to see that justice was paid them, he inserted a single devastatingly honest sentence: ... I was left, as I have so often been left by him before, with my mouth open and my hands in my lap, deeply deeply amazed. (page 99) I have left out Forster’s “single devastatingly honest sentence,” only wanting to note there is a comparable honest sentence of Maxwell’s near the end of his book, though I don’t think Maxwell (or Forster) was capable of writing a dishonest one. I described Forster’s biography of his great-aunt as being written in “warm, respectful, intelligent, simple prose” and that applies to Maxwell's ‘family history’ as well. You may learn more than you want to know about his ancestors —though it’s a quite fascinating story starting in the 18th-century— but if you've read Maxwell's fiction, you’ll recognize family incidents (his aunt severely burning her hands); their neighbors (Dr. Donald and the Dyers); and even direct quotations that made their way into his stories (“I don’t care what the Presbyterians say, He went down under the water and He came up out of the water!”). I love the cover because it was done by Maxwell’s daughter, Brookie Maxwell, thus extending “Ancestors” into descendants.