The Tribal Knot A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change [Paperback]

Are we responsible for, and to, those forces that have formed usour families, friends, and communities? Where do we leave off and others begin? In The Tribal Knot, Rebecca McClanahan looks for answers in the history of her family. Poring over letters, artifacts, and documents that span more than a century, she discovers a tribe of hardscrabble Midwest farmers, hunters, trappers, and laborers struggling to hold tight to the ties that bind them, through poverty, war, political upheavals, illness and accident, filicide and suicide, economic depressions, personal crises, and global disasters. Like the practitioners of Victorian hair art who wove strands of family members' hair into a single design, McClanahan braids her ancestors' stories into a single intimate narrative of her search to understand herself and her place in the family's complex past.

Rebecca McClanahan, the author of nine previous books, including The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, which won the Glasgow award in nonfiction, is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Wood Prize from Poetry, and fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council.

Far from a disinterested historian, she relishes her role in the family...Her joy is impossible to miss. Her curiosity about long-dead ancestors and her sympathy for the hard-working farm women are equally vivid.To enter Rebecca McClanahan's memoir is to truly enter her lifeher history, her geography, her tribe. The blending of photographs, letters, and diary entries into McClanahan's intelligent, lyrical and thoughtful prose makes this one of the fullest reading experiences I have had in a very long time.Book like no other Ive read, The Tribal Knot combines genres to become something entirely new. Memoir, novel, genealogy, biography, survivors testimony, study of generations of women, love story, catalogue of precious quotidian details, and portrait of Twentieth Century American life, this book takes us whlƒ×