[A Family Trust is a] slow-moving but eloquent book about a Midwestern family, the Risings, and their feelings for and connections with the small Republican town whose newspaper they run. In describing the lives of several generations of newspapermen and their families from the nineteen-thirties to almost the present, Mr. Just really gives us a subtle mid-century profile of the Midwest (where he grew up). From the family patriarch, Amos Rising, whose shadow dogs his three sons even after his death, to the independent-minded, freedom-loving daughter of the newspaper's last family editor and publisher, all the Risings are touching in their struggle to come to terms with their region's "landlocked sense of inferiority and rejection coupled with an equally strong sense of virtue and destiny." Mr. Just's prose, like the people he writes about, is plain, controlled, and brimming with energy, and it is no small mark of his skill that he constantly elicits strong sympathy from the reader for even the most hidebound of the cramped, rigid, conservative characters with whom his book overflows.