Brewster chronicles the histories of 17th-century books that came into his family’s possession in the 1800s, and, through them, the troubled past of his clan.

In 1951, when the author was 10 years old and his brother, Sam, was 12, the pair found some old tomes in the attic of their home in Glen Cove, New York. The books were very old, and it was soon revealed that they dated all the way back to the mid-1600s. They were originally purchased by William Stoughton, who’s best known as the judge who presided over the infamous Salem witch trials, and who signed the death warrants of those who were unjustly convicted. One of the volumes bore what the author calls “creepy flyleaf notations,” handwritten by Stoughton, that mentioned “evil spirits.” The young author thought that this referred to a curse that haunted his own troubled family; later, he realized that Stoughton had pulled the phrase from a satirical poem about indefatigable bill collectors. The Brewster family originally obtained the books in 1801, and Brewster uses them in the memoir as a way to enter into a discussion of his family’s affluent but often unquiet past—one marked by war, depression, suicide, and even murder. The author recalls painful moments in his own personal history, as well, including a sexual assault he experienced as a boy almost 70 years ago, which he relates with the urgency of someone who’s determined to bear witness: “Harm and rage that will not go away, no matter how many decades pass, need to be voiced and heard.”

Brewster presents a memoir that’s intriguingly unconventional in style and structure. Although the narrative is built around the nearly 400-year-old tomes, it quickly transcends them and ultimately relates not only the author’s family history, but also a reflection on human nature: “My purpose in writing this little book has been not to document, much less glorify, any splinter or fragment of society. I mean only to tell a few stories, some comical, some sad or tragic, but in every case stories of universal human experience.” His family members’ lives are almost cinematically dramatic; in one memorable episode, for instance, the author flew to Turkey when he learned that his older brother, Tom, had been arrested for attempting to overthrow the government—a charge largely based on Tom’s possession of a Kurdish-Turkish dictionary. The curse of the evil spirits, as the young author understood it, made a profound impression upon him, and he saw it, in part, as an expression of inevitable torment that comes with wealth and an unceasing devotion to business. Overall, it’s an affecting work, and a thoughtful and engrossing meditation on attempting to come to grips with family difficulties that, as presented here, seem to have an air of inexorability. Brewster’s writing is elegantly polished, but also casually anecdotal, and the remembrance as a whole is so concise that readers are likely to be left wanting to read more of his recollections.

A captivating and movingly elegiac memoir.