Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging by Alex

Description: Futureface by Alex Wagner "CBS News anchor Wagner, daughter of a Burmese immigrant mother and an Irish-Luxembourgian-American father from Iowa, recounts a genealogical voyage through Burma, Europe, and the Internet that shook her understanding of family history"--Publishers weekly, 03/05/2018. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description From the host of MSNBCs Alex Wagner Tonight, "a rich and revealing memoir" (The New York Times) about her travels around the globe to solve the mystery of her ancestry, confronting the question at the heart of the American experience of immigration, race, and identity: Who are my people?"A thoughtful, beautiful meditation on what makes us who we are . . . and the values and ideals that bind us together as Americans."—Barack Obama The daughter of a Burmese mother and a white American father, Alex Wagner grew up thinking of herself as a "futureface"—an avatar of a mixed-race future when all races would merge into a brown singularity. But when one family mystery leads to another, Wagners post-racial ideals fray as she becomes obsessed with the specifics of her own familys racial and ethnic history. Drawn into the wild world of ancestry, she embarks upon a quest around the world—and into her own DNA—to answer the ultimate questions of who she really is and where she belongs. The journey takes her from Burma to Luxembourg, from ruined colonial capitals with records written on banana leaves to Mormon databases, genetic labs, and the rest of the twenty-first-century genealogy complex. But soon she begins to grapple with a deeper question: Does it matter? Is our enduring obsession with blood and land, race and identity, worth all the trouble its caused us? Wagner weaves together fascinating history, genetic science, and sociology but is really after deeper stuff than her own ancestry: in a time of conflict over who we are as a country, she tries to find the story where we all belong. Praise for Futureface"Smart, searching . . . Meditating on our ancestors, as Wagners own story shows, can suggest better ways of being ourselves."—Maud Newton, The New York Times Book Review "Sincere and instructive . . . This timely reflection on American identity, with a bonus exposé of DNA ancestry testing, deserves a wide audience."—Library Journal "The narrative is part Mary Roach–style participation-heavy research, part family history, and part exploration of existential loneliness. . . . The journey is worth taking."—Kirkus Reviews "[A] ruminative exploration of ethnicity and identity . . . Wagners odyssey is an effective riposte to anti-immigrant politics."—Publishers Weekly Author Biography Alex Wagner is the host of Alex Wagner Tonight on MSBNC. She lives in New York City. Review "Futureface raises urgent questions having to do with history and complicity. . . . A rich and revealing memoir."—The New York Times"A thoughtful, beautiful meditation on what makes us who we are . . . and the values and ideals that bind us together as Americans."—Barack Obama"Smart, searching . . . Meditating on our ancestors, as Wagners own story shows, can suggest better ways of being ourselves."—Maud Newton, The New York Times Book Review"Sincere and instructive . . . This timely reflection on American identity, with a bonus exposé of DNA ancestry testing, deserves a wide audience."—Library Journal"The narrative is part Mary Roach–style participation-heavy research, part family history, and part exploration of existential loneliness. . . . The journey is worth taking."—Kirkus Reviews"[A] ruminative exploration of ethnicity and identity . . . Wagners odyssey is an effective riposte to anti-immigrant politics."—Publishers Weekly "Alex Wagner is brilliant and hilarious. Futureface is a magic trick: She starts with the humble story of a third-culture kids existential loneliness and ends with a smart, timely, and moving exploration of family lies, exile and immigration, genetics, and the mystery of human belonging."—Eddie Huang, bestselling author of Fresh Off the Boat "Futureface is an important contribution to the American conversation—Alex Wagners story is insightful, moving, informative, and searing. I have deeply admired Alex for a long time as an original thinker, a keenly observant journalist, and a funny, empathetic human being. Read this book and youll understand why."—Wes Moore, bestselling author of The Other Wes Moore Review Quote " Futureface raises urgent questions having to do with history and complicity. . . . A rich and revealing memoir." -- The New York Times "A thoughtful, beautiful meditation on what makes us who we are . . . and the values and ideals that bind us together as Americans." --Barack Obama "Smart, searching . . . Meditating on our ancestors, as Wagners own story shows, can suggest better ways of being ourselves." --Maud Newton , The New York Times Book Review "Sincere and instructive . . . This timely reflection on American identity, with a bonus expos Excerpt from Book Part I Solitaire Chapter One I played a lot of solitaire growing up. I was an only child and a nerd and thus alone a lot of the time, and when I wasnt, I was asked to mind my manners and keep quiet around the adults. For most of my adolescence, I used a weathered pack of dark blue playing cards that had the logo of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters embossed in gold on the back: a pair of horses heads atop a wagon wheel. Adults would see the horse head next to the Teamsters name and laugh in disbelief that a union with alleged mafia ties would have a horses head anywhere near its logo. I hadnt yet seen The Godfather, and so I didnt understand the irony, but I often pretended I did. "I know!" I would say, laughing along without understanding. I was alone, on the outside of the joke, wishing (rather pathetically) to be on the inside--where everyone else was. The Teamsters union was where my mother worked, at the tail end of the heyday of American labor organizing, circa 1971. She had immigrated to America from Rangoon, Burma, in 1965, escaping a military dictatorship. From her initial landing pad in Washington, D.C., she went on to attend Swarthmore College, became enamored of leftist politics, and moved to Philadelphia after graduation to live in a commune with her French boyfriend and print up copies of what she described as a "socialist daily." The French boyfriend fell out of favor, and my mother moved back to Washington, D.C., where she found a job at the Teamsters union. That led to an interview for a job at the Alliance for Labor Action. The man who interviewed her there was my father, and from the moment they met, she couldnt stand him. Perhaps that should have been a warning, but instead it became their meet-cute: They hated each other! And then they got married. My fathers ancestral path to that game-changing interview began on the opposite side of the world. He was the fourth child of a rural mail carrier in northeast Iowa, the son of an Irish American mother and a father who claimed roots in Luxembourg. My dad showed an early interest in politics and, like my mother, came to Washington to do the work of liberal causes. There were no socialist dailies or French girlfriends, but he had longish hair and worked on George McGoverns presidential campaign and knew Hunter S. Thompson. My mother and fathers remote histories intersected on a bridge of progressive bona fides and casual early seventies bohemianism. Only a few generations back, their families had been separated by oceans and mountain ranges and steppes. But in Washington, their shared values were enough to draw them close. They were married in 1975 and several years later had their only child--me, a daughter born of an unlikely set of Burmese-Luxembourg-Irish bloodlines. Of this weird heritage, I knew little. Our Burmese story was relayed to me by my mother and grandmother, in occasional fits and starts, usually with food as the catalyst. A pot of chicken curry would summon some certain memory, which would in turn beget a snippet of family history. But only a snippet--the stories were carefully constructed, well-worn vignettes that never risked genuine revelation. Burma was kept at a safe distance from our American lives. My fathers people were from Europe. His grandfather left the Old World sometime during the late nineteenth century, motivation unclear. I didnt know much about his departure and why hed made it, or even much about the place where he began: Luxembourg, a strange country about which little was discussed in my family. The one detail that slipped through was the name of his exotic-sounding hometown: Esch. And all we knew about Esch was that it sounded like the sort of place youd want to get away from. Luxembourg itself was largely irrelevant. For most of my adolescence, I confused it with Liechtenstein, an ant-sized country buried between Austria and Switzerland. Most everyone else also confused Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, and when forced to identify either country, would offer that it was "The smallest country in the world?" It wasnt. My fathers mother and her family were from Ireland, but as far as American family histories went, Ireland didnt interest me much. The good parts of being Irish had become common property, as familiar as Saint Patricks Day. Everyone knew Irish daughters were redheaded and pale and the boys drank too much and were always in fistfights. I was none of those things. So Luxembourg was the ancestral provenance I most frequently cited, but that was a little like being from the dark side of the moon or an island in the center of an ocean: It was like being from nowhere. As a child I didnt think much about the improbability of these family histories, or that I was in some way charged with their inheritance. And no one told me much about it anyway. I was mostly taught that my ancestors, whoever they were--the people thrust upon me by the random genetic alignments in the universe--should in no way affect my destiny. Anyway, wasnt that the whole point of America? Dynasties were for the Old World. Tradition was something held aloft by Queen Elizabeth and her Easter egg-colored suits, and bloodlines were for horses and pharaohs. America, as we had been taught, was about forward movement, not backward. Such was the proposition written in the American Gospel of Expansion and intoned to us by countless self-made politicians of every political stripe: "Go west, young man!" And by "Go west," we really meant "Look forward--dont worry about all that shit youre leaving behind." I understood that at Christmastime my fathers side of the family enjoyed drinking a sludgy and highly alcoholic concoction known as a Tom and Jerry, that there were nuns whod rapped his knuckles in middle school, and that in his hometown, large families were not an exception, but a given. These were my main cultural reference points for "Irish Catholic." And they represented the extent to which my life was informed by this heritage: not in the least. They were stories recounted as asides, reminders of my fathers storybook beginning before he came east. Elsewhere in our house, Asia was present but not entirely accounted for. When my mother went to bed each night, she knelt in prayer toward a small gold statue of the Buddha as she recited her prayers, softly and quickly. Shed touch my knee as we drove past cemeteries, and whenever I mentioned death, she would mutter in Burmese under her breath. She made me spit on my fingernails every time I trimmed them. Practically speaking, this is what it meant to be half-Burmese: a series of traditions and voodoo-like practices I didnt really understand but nonetheless accepted. Every April, when it was time for the annual Burmese New Years water festival of Thingyan, the immigrant community in and around suburban Silver Spring, Maryland, would traditionally gather in someones backyard. On the streets of Rangoon, men and women and children threw water at one another in celebration of the new year--and to cool off in the middle of the excruciatingly hot dry season. But in the mid-Atlantic United States, sloshing water around on 54-degree early spring weekends was an annual torture, a trauma visited upon me and my white tights by boys, usually aged ten to twelve. Armed with plastic buckets brimming with cold water from the garden hose, the boys would unceremoniously hurl water at me, with very little mirth for the coming year. I hated it, and would have much preferred to celebrate the New Year--everybody elses new year--with Dick Clark and the Times Square ball and a glittery, feathered tiara (for me, not Dick Clark). Each April, as I beelined back to the circle of adults giggling and clucking at my soaked clothing, I felt annoyed and angry that I had to suffer through these stupid indignities, these annual pretend celebrations of heritage and calendar. I thought of myself as generically American, both in cultural preference (Chips Ahoy, Murder, She Wrote) and appearance (Esprit and Sebagos), but occasionally, I was reminded that how I saw myself wasnt necessarily how everyone else saw me. As on the day when I sat at the counter of the American City Diner and the white line cook turned to ask me, while my father was in the bathroom, if I was adopted. I brushed it off, as if this were something I was asked all the time (it most certainly wasnt), laughing to relieve him of the burden of such an awkward question, and responding, "Oh no, my mothers just Asian!" Moments like this were reminders that, to some people, I was not generically American. I had invested fully in the story my parents told me. I considered most everyone--white line cooks, black flight attendants, Puerto Rican teachers, whatever--American, just like me, never minding that we didnt look alike or come from the same places. We were here! And yet the feeling was not always mutual: In the eyes of certain folks, who were universally certain white folks, I was not generically American; I was something else. If my "we" included them, theirs did not include me. Even then, as a twelve-year-old in the diner drinking a vanilla malted, I recognized the power of this exclusivity. I was deferential to it, offering a grinning explanation as to why I didnt look the way some line cook thought the daughter of an average white American should look, a statement that verged on an apology. The cooks certainty over what was generically American and what was not generically American seemed to be deeply entwined with something--blood or DNA or place--that was far more definitive than the casual connections Id forged in my life thus far. Esprit tops and Nabisco c Details ISBN0812987500 Author Alex Wagner Short Title FUTUREFACE Pages 352 Language English ISBN-10 0812987500 ISBN-13 9780812987508 Format Paperback DEWEY B Year 2019 Publication Date 2019-01-08 Subtitle A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2019-01-08 NZ Release Date 2019-01-08 US Release Date 2019-01-08 UK Release Date 2019-01-08 Place of Publication New York Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint One World Books Illustrations CHAPTER-OPENING PHOTOS; 1 GRAPH Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:137586497;

Price: 51.76 AUD

Location: Melbourne

End Time: 2025-01-08T06:32:30.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 AUD