What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World: A Memoir

Lazard debuts with a moving chronicle of her life, from growing up in segregated late-1960s St. Louis to becoming a historian and librarian in the Bay Area, where she still lives. She recalls her mother’s epilepsy and how the illness resulted in her and her brother’s placement in a Catholic orphanage for three years, until their uncle arrived and took them to California, where Lazard started middle school. The book’s title is based on an admonition from Lazard’s grandmother: despite its intended chastising effect, the comment sparked a fire in the curious child to learn about herself and the world around her. That thirst for knowledge led to surreptitious visits to the library, where she “could spend the afternoon being an inventor, a prairie farmer, a runaway slave.” The author eloquently reflects on weighty subjects through the eyes of a child, including the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, Emmett Till’s murder, and the deaths of her parents. Lazard refers to her narrative as “my recovery mission to retrieve a time in my life that marked me more deeply than any other,” and she succeeds handily, thanks to rigorous scene-building and memorable characterizations of her family. This is a powerful account. (May)