For a nation...so committed presumably to the rejection of birth and blood, the people of the United States throughout their history have devoted an enormous amount of energy, time, and money to genealogy and the search for ancestors. To explain this anomaly--indeed, to explain how the search for ancestors evolved in different forms over four centuries and eventually became a distinctly American mode of genealogy--is the burden of Francois Weil's well-researched and readable book, "Family Trees". Weil, who is chancellor of the Universities of Paris and professor of history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, knows America well, but he has sufficient distance to be honest and dispassionate about it. The result is a succinct history of genealogy in a nation that supposedly denies the importance of birth and ancestors.--Gordon S. Wood"New York Review of Books" (05/23/2013)
