[close] Using letters and other family documents, Frazier reconstructs two hundred years of middle-class life, visiting small towns his ancestors lived in, reading books they read, and discovering the larger forces of history that affected them.He observes some of them during the Revolutionary War, he follows others west as they pioneer in the wilderness of Ohio and Indiana, and he visits the battlefields where they fought the Civil War.Family is a poetic epic of facts, a chronicle of Protestant culture's rise and fall, a memorial, and a revised view of American history as romantic as it is cold-eyed.AUTHORBIO: IAN FRAZIER lives in Montclair, New Jersey.His previous books include Great Plains, On the Rez, and Coyote v. Acme. [close]