The central lesson of genealogy is both banal and profound: We are all related. The human race is a sea of distant cousins separated only by geography and circumstance. OK, so what? Making this biological fact meaningful is the challenge facing any writer attempting family history. Typically, the project takes one of two forms: a specific story of an individual family (as in the case of Edward Ball’s “Slaves in the Family’’) or a global approach to human evolution (Spencer Wells’s “The Journey of Man’’). In “Faces of America,’’ Henry Louis Gates Jr. has found a middle path: He applies the most rigorous genealogical and genetic tools to the family histories of 12 ethnically distinct Americans, and in doing so touches on the history of not only these individuals but on the human race itself. For anyone who enjoyed Gates’s popular PBS programs “African American Lives” or the NBC series “Who Do You Think You Are?”, “Faces of America,’’ based on a second Gates TV project, will serve as another enjoyable and educational installment of America’s newest pastime: celebrity genealogy.
We are family
Genealogical and genetic tools trace the family histories of 12 celebrities and hint at the connections binding us all
Gates sought the support of “twelve remarkable people . . . who have made a profound cultural impact on our nation and who come from different backgrounds,” among them Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep, Yo-Yo Ma, Louise Erdrich, Malcolm Gladwell, and Kristi Yamaguchi. Gates’s breezy, intimate style and obvious affection for his subjects (“[O]ver dinners on Martha’s Vineyard, I had come to learn a bit about [Mike Nichols’s] remarkable childhood.” ) results in a book that is the bionic version of that old fourth-grade family tree assignment, thanks to the support of a world-class Rolodex and Harvard researchers and geneticists. It’s fun.
Each chapter takes on the genealogy of one American and, given the diverse backgrounds of Gates’s subjects, the book offers a broad picture of America’s immigration history. One of the strongest themes of the book, in fact, is the issue of American immigration policy, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which ironically made it possible for Kristi Yamaguchi’s Japanese grandfather to attain a work permit and emigrate to the suddenly labor-starved Hawaii), to the requirement that, in 1938, Jewish immigrants from Germany be “guaranteed” financially by an American relative in order to gain passage — as in the case of Mike Nichols’s family seeking refuge from the Nazi regime.