A FAMILY PLACE: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family

Tracing her family history for nearly two centuries by focusing on just one house, Philip's meandering but mesmerizing memoir is set in Talavera, a rambling Federal-period manse on several hundred acres in the Hudson Valley, two hours from downtown Manhattan. Spurred by the 1992 death of her father, who for more than 40 years had tended the land's thousands of apple and other fruit trees, Philip began to dig through the accumulated household accounts, daily journals, family letters and collected artifacts stretching back to 1807, when the house was built, and even to 1730, when her Dutch forebears first settled the land. Her aim was to learn how her family has held on to the land for so long, and to understand why, though confronted by harsh financial realities, she and her mother and four siblings are determined to carry on. In a style that's more prosaic than poetic, she tells of her own decision to take a leave (as professor of English at Colgate) to help her mother run the farm, while exploring her fascinating family past of 18th-century manor lords and tenant farmers, Civil War and World War II heroes, dissipated sons and rebellious daughters, suffragette aunts and grandmothers and, most stirring of all, the existence of a half-sister her father never knew he had (or if he did, never told his own family about). Both narrative threads are profoundly personal. Braided together with insight, they pay homage to the ideals of home and family with a resonance that should extend beyond her home region. (Sept.)