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What makes books on family history so compelling for me is that they offer a fresh and personal lens on historical events while simultaneously illustrating how historical circumstances have a profound impact on the development of people and their descendants.
Raised in Santiago, Berkeley and Mexico City,
Claudio Lomnitz is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University.
Lomnitz’s quest to understand his ancestors’ lives was made more difficult by the need to unravel the complicated national claims on their places of origin. As he notes, “I had to study a great deal just to answer one apparently simple question: Where were they from?”