A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

I was looking up a book about genealogy on Amazon a while ago, and as those things often do, that book led to another book led to this one, I think.  Or something like that.  I requested Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into A Family Secret by Steve Luxenberg through ILL.  I know that I always say that non-fiction and I don't get along, but lately that seems to be all that I'm reading.  And honestly stories like this that essentially are some sort of genealogical scavenger hunt or detective story tend to suck me in.  I like them because I have an interest in genealogy and have become by my own family's historian and keeper of the family tree--and anyone who has done any long term genealogical research knows that every family tree has its share of mysteries. This story begins with the roundabout revelation of a decades old family secret.  At a meeting with her doctor and social worker, Luxenberg's mother, Beth, casually mentions a sister.  This informatio...

Every Bolechower we had talked to until that night had survived by not moving: by staying perfectly still for days and weeks and months in attics, in haylofts, in cellars, in secret compartments, in holes dug into the forest floor, and in the strangest, most confining prison of all, the fragile prison of a false identity. The last story we were to hear was, like a story you might hear in an epic poem, a Greek myth, a story of perpetual movement, of ceaseless wandering." from page 416 The Lost: A Search For Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn is non-fiction. Because I know well my difficult relationship with non-fiction, I know I usually start the book but never finish it. I can't help it. With non-fiction you always know the outcome and there isn't any suspense. So it's very rarely that I pick up a non-fiction book to read because I know that chances are I won't finish it and what's the point reading something you know you won't finish when you ca...