THENEWYORKER,M AY9, 2022 71
cluding among progressive intellectuals.
Eugenic policies deployed ancestry in
violent new ways; a Virginia steriliza-
tion law was upheld by the Supreme
Court in 1927, when Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., made the notorious pro-
nouncement that “three generations of
imbeciles are enough.” (It was his fa-
ther, incidentally, who originated the
phrase “Boston Brahmin,” to describe
the city’s hereditary élite.) American
eugenicists inspired the architects of
Nazi race laws, which triggered what
must be the largest mass uptake of ge-
nealogical research in history, by requir-
ing the vast majority of Germans to
produce “ancestor passes” to prove Aryan
descent. Another term sharing the fa-
miliar root was coined in 1943 to de-
scribe what happened to Jews and oth-
ers who couldn’t comply: “genocide.”
E
ach way that humans have con-
ceived of ancestry has been layered
onto others. Genealogies record spiri-
tual and social priorities rooted in ori-
gin stories. Family and citizenship law
codifies privileges and exclusions based
on lineage. Today’s addictive Web sites
and sleekly packaged DNA kits rest on
deep, if not always acknowledged, as-
sumptions about the fixity of status,
race, ethnicity, and nationality. Ances-
try doesn’t simply have power, in the
emotional and psychological respects
that Newton describes; in critical ways,
it is an instrument of power.
The emergence of the Mormons as
drivers of the modern genealogy indus-
try exemplifies these interconnections.
Just a few years after the antiquarian
John Farmer published the “Genealog-
ical Register of the First Settlers of New
England” (1829)—a work that, accord-
ing to the historian François Weil,
“transformed the practice of genealogy
in the United States”—Joseph Smith,
the founder of Mormonism, had a vi-
sion in which the prophet Elijah urged
him to turn “the hearts of the children
to their fathers.” While middle-class
white Americans looked for lineal con-
nections to a national origin story em-
bodied in “first settlers” and “Founding
Fathers,” Mormons began conducting
proxy baptisms of ancestors who had
died before the origin of the Church.
By the mid-eighteen-forties, when the
nation’s first genealogical organization
BRIEFLY NOTED
Didn’t We Almost Have It All, by Gerrick Kennedy (Abrams).
Fusing biography and cultural criticism, this consideration
of Whitney Houston is also a study of reputation. Houston,
born in 1963 in Newark, cultivated her voice in church and
under the tutelage of her mother, a gospel singer; she also
suffered sexual abuse and began using cocaine at a young age.
Such troubles—and an important same-sex relationship—
made living in the public eye fraught. Even at her most suc-
cessful (she remains the only recording artist to have had
seven consecutive No. 1 hits), she was dismissed as a “yup-
pie icon,” with some Black radio stations refusing to play her
music. Kennedy, however, highlights her “sisterhood” with
younger Black singers, including Faith Evans and Monica.
La Nijinska, by Lynn Garafola (Oxford). Long overshadowed
by her older brother, the tragic virtuoso Vaslav Nijinsky, Bro-
nislava Nijinska (1891-1972) was also an important dancer
and choreographer, and this scrupulous biography illumi-
nates the formidable scope of her accomplishments. Nijinska
made integral contributions to her brother’s legendary dances,
staged groundbreaking creations of her own (including “Les
Noces” and “Les Biches”), and trained future stars such as
Frederick Ashton, Cyd Charisse, and Maria Tallchief. Ga-
rafola documents the ways in which a misogynistic estab-
lishment undermined Nijinska’s achievements and argues
that, despite this, her ideas about the relationship between
movement and music and her gender-bending experiments
in abstraction helped shape the modern art of ballet.
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo ( Viking). Populated entirely by
animals, this novel slyly invokes “Animal Farm” while depict-
ing more recent political struggles. The protagonist is a goat
named Destiny, an exile returning to the fictional African
nation of Jidada after the ouster of its longtime autocrat, Old
Horse (explicitly modelled on Robert Mugabe), by a new
authoritarian, called the Savior. Destiny delves into the taboo
subject of political disappearances, and her fearlessness cat-
alyzes a citizenry whose most potent act of defiance is to
name the dead in public. Bulawayo’s chronicle of the new
government’s corruption and the old one’s brutality drama-
tizes Zimbabwean history while also illuminating the chal-
lenges of many developing nations.
How Strange a Season, by Megan Mayhew Bergman (Scrib-
ner). Women’s homeownership and its promise of security are
at stake in this closely observed story collection. A rancher
concocts a peculiar side business to save the property she in-
herited from her mother; a divorcing woman must decide
whether to move to California to claim the glass house her
grandmother left her; a matriarch’s fear of losing her family
home compels her to send her barely adult daughter down a
life-altering path. In several stories, climate change looms, but
casting darker shadows are the book’s many absent or inade-
quate parents. One character is convinced that her forebears’
missteps are “inside of her, like the rings of a felled tree.”
