Family (Magill Book Reviews)
At a glance:
- Author: Ian Frazier
- First Published: 1994
- Type of Work: Biography
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: Family or family life, Genealogy, Suicide, Authors or writers, World War II, Midwest, Social life, Cancer, American Revolution, Civil War, Farms, farmers, or farming
- Locales: Ohio, Indiana
Like most people, Ian Frazier is intrigued by family history. His book, FAMILY, introduces readers to the Frazier clan, although it does so against the historical circumstances in which each family member lived. The result is an evocation of life in southern Connecticut during the Revolutionary War and, in considerably more detail, of small-town life in Ohio from the Civil War era to the final decade of the twentieth century.
One meets various Fraziers, Wickhams, and Benedicts, some of the first Ohio pioneers who settled in the town they called Norwalk after the place from which they had come. They turned quickly from farming to law and prospered as the United States expanded westward. They fought for the Union during the Civil War, and though the author’s antecedents survived, many from Norwalk did not. Frazier’s narrative of the battle at Chancellorsville, Virginia, draws upon family letters as well as more familiar historiography to describe the engagement which decimated the Norwalk contingent.
From the maternal side of the author’s family readers meet the Bachmans and the Hurshes, German or German-Swiss, solidly Lutheran, and ministers or academics. They too were Ohioans, but from the predominately German-speaking town of Tifflin. Although no individual on either side of the family attained national celebrity or vast wealth, all were part of the ambitious, hard-working stock that built America.
Frazier’s parents were no exception. His father was a research chemist for Sohio, the regional company formed after dissolution of the Standard Oil Trust. His mother was a high school teacher with a lifelong, never fully realized ambition for acting. Like many Americans after World War II, they became suburbanites, building a home in Hudson, Ohio. Like many, they had a large family and valued education as a means of improving the material well-being of their children. The American Dream, never identical in conception and outcome, continues in the author’s generation, though with decidedly more limits.
Sources for Further Study
Chicago Tribune. November 13, 1994, XIV, p. 5.
Commonweal. CXXI, December 2, 1994, p. 24.
Library Journal. CXIX, October 15, 1994, p. 69.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. November 27, 1994, p. 3.
National Review. XLVI, December 19, 1994, p. 57.
The New York Times Book Review. XCIX, November 6, 1994, p. 9.
Newsweek. CXXIV, November 7, 1994, p. 73.
Publishers Weekly. CCXLI, November 14, 1994, p. 49.
The Wall Street Journal. November 30, 1994, p. A16.
The Washington Post Book World. XXIV, October 16, 1994, p. 3.
