It Runs in the Family: A Memoir

By Richard Manning

Book Overview

It Runs in the Family is a memoir of faith and willful ignorance, truths and secrets, rural and urban labor, and fire: fire as both knowledge and destructive force. Richard Manning was raised on a piece of farmland in Michigan, in a working- class family of Christian fundamentalists. Manning's father was a jack of many trades: farmer, carpenter, builder, power lineman, factory worker, small businessman. His mother concealed her own troubled childhood beneath a religious faith that explained away uncertainty, illness, and tragedy. Manning grew up learning how to work and what to believe---but came to understand his family's seemingly-normal facade as a mask for troubling secrets. It Runs in the Family is the story of Manning's journey away from his family, one that ranges from their Michigan farm to the fire-ravaged wilderness of Montana, and finally to a remote village in Panama, where he comes to pursue a past he had vowed to leave behind. Linking his own life with the larger story of his family, the land they inhabited, and the right-wing fundamentalist politics gaining ground in America, Richard Manning offers a singular memoir.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312620306
• ISBN13: 9780312620301
• Release Date: July 2013
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 307 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.3" x 9.0"