The Distancers

Chris Henry Coffey lends his masculine all-American voice to this account of seven generations of a family in America's Heartland. Lee Sandlin begins this family memoir with his colorful German ancestors, who immigrated to the Midwest in 1850 to establish a hotel and brewery. Coffey delivers the narrative with a straightforward tone that illustrates the stoicism of Sandlin's relations, adding an occasional lightheartedness to demonstrate the family's more unusual characters. Amateur ham radio operators in the middle of the twentieth century, including one of Sandlin's uncles, informally competed for the most far-flung signal. They called themselves distancers, but the name could also apply to the people in the author's family, who meticulously distanced themselves from each other, even when living together for decades. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine