From the acclaimed author of the international best seller Einstein's Dreams'a lyrical memoir of Memphis in the 1930'60s, the music and racism, the early days of the movies, and a powerful grandfather whose ghost continues to haunt the family. Alan Lightman's grandfather M.A. Lightman was the family's undisputed patriarch: it was his movie theater empire that catapulted the family to prominence in the South; his fearless success that both galvanized and paralyzed his descendants, haunting them for a half century after his death. In this lyrical and impressionistic memoir, Lightman writes about returning to Memphis in an attempt to understand the origins he so eagerly left behind forty years before. As aging uncles and aunts begin telling family stories, Lightman rediscovers his southern roots and slowly realizes the errors in his perceptions of his grandfather and of his own father, crushed by M.A. Here is a family saga from 1880 to the present, set against a throbbing century of Memphis'the rhythm and blues, the barbecue and pecan pie, and the segregated society, including personal encounters with Elvis, Martin Luther King, Jr., and E. H. "Boss" Crump. At the heart of it all is a family haunted by the ghost of the domineering M.A., and the struggle of the author to understand his conflicted loyalties to his father and grandfather.
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