One Family

“Genealogy is a way of telling stories held together by threads of family,” Seltzer (author of The Bulatovich Saga, among many other titles) writes in this searching, unpredictable memoir of his and his family’s encounters with the surprises of their lineage. Exploring the idea that, in some ways, all of humanity is deeply related, with “every person on Earth…at least a fiftieth cousin of everyone else,” One Family finds Seltzer taking pride in surprising historical connections—and he encourages readers to celebrate their own lineages, too, even if deciding “you may want to revise your ideas of what is truth” when deciding what goes into one’s family history.

Seltzer leads the way with spirited excursions into his family’s ancestry, inspired by his mother’s impassioned work on the subject, and much literary, cultural, and philosophical commentary, plus some telling personal anecdotes, that probe contemporary individuals’ connection to human history—and ask what it means that, thousands of years from now, people on this planet and others will have descended from you. Seltzer’s conviction that what we believe is more important than what actually happened affords him license to indulge theories and curiosities, via lines of inheritance stretching back hundreds and thousands of years. Charting a family history, for Seltzer, involves choice and not just genetics, and he welcomes the "traditions, legends, and other influences” through which he finds connection to notables like the “Extraordinary Women” of the Middle Ages celebrated in brisk biographical sketches (among them Eleanor of Aquitaine, Saint Margaret of Scotland, and Saint Ludmila, dubbed the “Grandmother of Good King Wenceslaus and His Murderer”).

The “one family” idea is driven home by a lengthy appendix tracing lines of descent from Norse and Greek Gods to Jesus and Mary Magdalene to dozens of generations in different lines around the globe. Elsewhere, Seltzer shares stories of love and loss, parenting and being parented, premonitions of death, mysteries of identity, and the challenge of finding meaning in it all. His bottom line: we’re all bound together, more deeply than we often know.

- BookLife editors' choice review, to be published in Publishers' Weekly 7/21/2025

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