Every family has a skeleton in the closet, but historian-author Michael Luick-Thrams has unearthed an entire cemetery lying beneath his family’s 400-year sojourn in North America. This book—the first in a trilogy—explores the American experience as lived by a “typical” Heartland family, one with deep, gnarled roots reaching back to 1630.
In this peerless John-and-Jane-Doe family history, “normal citizens” prove to be most unusual characters. An out-of-luck auto mechanic becomes an affable terrorist. A stressed mom resorts to mass-murder. A butcher turns frontier lawman. A tormented granny pilfers the grandkids’ doll clothes, and a cavalry man thrashes his superiors. And, there’s always the ghost of the philandering near-mute farmer who caused this whole review in the first place.
While on the surface a family memoir, Christopher Cory, editor of the Yale Class of ’62 website, notes “This tome offers fresh illumination to classic themes central to America’s formation. In it, Luick-Thrams illustrates the macro through the micro—tales in which all of us, at some point, can see ourselves..”
Roots of Darkness is the first in the series Oceans of Darkness, Oceans of Light: Our Troubles and Treasures in the New World, which recounts one family’s improbable journey from Europe to the heart of America and back. Along the way, its members have lived through disasters (“Indian” or a dozen other wars, poverty and hunger, locust as well as bacterial plagues, armed Depression-era rural unrest); and, they have found redemption.
A “digital-archive” genre, Oceans is a social history laced with meditations on family and life itself. The Waltons visit Sin City. A clan’s chronicle unlike any you’ve ever read, it both entertains and edifies. It features over 2,000 photos, paintings, posters, journal entries, letters, articles and artifacts related to its main characters. Together, they weave a colorful account of how one family helped shape a continent—and was indelibly shaped by it.
In this peerless John-and-Jane-Doe family history, “normal citizens” prove to be most unusual characters. An out-of-luck auto mechanic becomes an affable terrorist. A stressed mom resorts to mass-murder. A butcher turns frontier lawman. A tormented granny pilfers the grandkids’ doll clothes, and a cavalry man thrashes his superiors. And, there’s always the ghost of the philandering near-mute farmer who caused this whole review in the first place.
While on the surface a family memoir, Christopher Cory, editor of the Yale Class of ’62 website, notes “This tome offers fresh illumination to classic themes central to America’s formation. In it, Luick-Thrams illustrates the macro through the micro—tales in which all of us, at some point, can see ourselves..”
Roots of Darkness is the first in the series Oceans of Darkness, Oceans of Light: Our Troubles and Treasures in the New World, which recounts one family’s improbable journey from Europe to the heart of America and back. Along the way, its members have lived through disasters (“Indian” or a dozen other wars, poverty and hunger, locust as well as bacterial plagues, armed Depression-era rural unrest); and, they have found redemption.
A “digital-archive” genre, Oceans is a social history laced with meditations on family and life itself. The Waltons visit Sin City. A clan’s chronicle unlike any you’ve ever read, it both entertains and edifies. It features over 2,000 photos, paintings, posters, journal entries, letters, articles and artifacts related to its main characters. Together, they weave a colorful account of how one family helped shape a continent—and was indelibly shaped by it.
