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An Echo In My Blood
A Note from the Author / Reviews / An Excerpt / Purchase
A Note From The Author
Every so often, a journalist stumbles upon a story so irresistible in details and symbolism that it screams to be told. My 1998 book, Gaviotas, about visionaries attempting a utopia in the middle of hell, was like that. It had wonderfully original characters, a lush but menacing setting—Colombia—plus a captivating universal theme: the struggle against seemingly impossible odds.
Whenever I've been lucky enough to encounter such a potent scenario, I've felt blessed—until this time. An Echo in My Blood comes from the last place I ever look for material: my own life. Yet, there it was—painful, private, powerful, and impossible to avoid. In 1991, not long before my father died—yet when his mind was already too far gone for me to challenge him—I'd dined with his brother, an uncle I barely knew because for years they didn't speak. At one point that evening, I casually referred to the tale I'd heard my father tell all my life about what happened to our family back in Ukraine, where he was born. That saga had assumed mythic proportions during my childhood, so I was stunned when my uncle interrupted and said, "That's not what happened."
The path I would follow in the coming years while trying to solve the riddle of these two conflicting accounts—a discrepancy that had torn brothers and cousins apart—would take me to five continents, and would have implications far beyond my family. The secret lay buried in a legacy concealed from my generation, but one I'd unconsciously sensed nonetheless: unbeknownst to me, it had always been guiding the choice of subjects I'd pursued as a writer.
To uncover it meant not just turning the tools of journalism on my relatives, but entering a history of my people I'd never before considered relevant to me. Not only did I discover truths there about my family, but about everyone's. History, it turns out, matters. The headlines of yesterday formed the backdrop for our forebears' lives. In no small part, as a result they became who they did—an obvious notion, perhaps, but one that repeatedly staggered me as I probed my own family. It also echoed something that, as a professional, I'd strived continually to convey: that whether we choose to ignore current events or not, they affect us. Like history, the news matters. The conundrum that journalists face daily is how to make readers care about seemingly remote incidents. "This concerns you," we plead. "Listen!"
You—and your children. Just as our parents' times become our legacy, the fallout from our own era will land on the next generation. An Echo in My Blood invokes a deeply personal—at times, mortifying—chronicle to show how this phenomenon has played out in my family. Although everyone's details differ, I'm beholden to many people who, upon hearing me tell this story, urged me to write it.
Because, they insisted, in it they recognized themselves and their own kin. |
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Selected Works
Books
The World Without Us
An Echo in My Blood: The Search for a Family's Hidden Past
Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World
La
Frontera: The United States Border With Mexico
Articles
Three Planetary Futures Vanity Fair, April 2008
Earth Without People
Cartoon Op-ed
Mining the Imagination for New Energy
The Cocaine Connection
Diamonds in the Wild
Power Trip
The Sacred and Profane
Vanishing Forests, Endangered People
Radio
 Chiloé: A Bridge Too Far?
Resurrecting the Zápara
Laguna
Madre
Straw
Bale Homes in Mexico
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