cover image An American Family: The Kennans

An American Family: The Kennans

George Frost Kennan. W. W. Norton & Company, $22.95 (144pp) ISBN 978-0-393-05034-9

In this slender volume, Kennan--Pulitzer Prize winner, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and author of American Diplomacy and Sketches from a Life, among others--pays tribute to his ancestors. Kennan's ""honored grandfather,"" Thomas Lathrop Kennan, self-published the Genealogy of the Kennan Family in 1907. Inspired by his ancestor, Kennan privately published a brief paper titled An American Kennan Family 1744-1913. Now in his 90s, he has further researched his family's story (""in most respects an unexceptional family of their time and place"") and makes it public. Though charming and anecdotal, too much of the book is a plodding personal history: there are too many details about the town of Dumfries, Scotland, where the Kennan patriarch, James Kennan, was born in 1647; too many details about the economic and religious situations that brought Margaret Smith, the bride of the first American Kennan, to New England; too many details about the Kennans' estate--the household of James McKannon, for example, claimed three oxen and three acres of mowing land, which produced about three tons of hay a year. There's also a bit too much of Kennan as a detective whose sleuthing is not all that interesting. There are, nevertheless, many redemptive moments that make slogging through worthwhile, like the epilogue, a veritable ode to farming. Kennan perceptively notes the roles that education and the church both played in the parochial, isolated world of the New England family farm. He meditates on the early republic's tendency to resist ""all deviations, or even attempted deviations, from its uniformities."" And he offers a moving, if regionally biased, paean to the lasting influence of New England, which, Kennan argues, sent its hearty sons to the frontier, spreading its earnest values throughout the heartland. (Oct.)