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Teddy's Child NewSouth Books Historian and biographer Virginia Hamilton explores the deep roots of family and place in her coming-of-age memoir set in Birmingham, Alabama, in the period between World Wars I and II. Born into a family of journalists and writers, she lived a life charmed with books, interesting people, good schools, and travel. Yet there were shadows of both the genteel poverty her family fell into during the Great Depression and of mental depression and what were then called nervous disorders. As a historian, Hamilton has long been admired for her prose style and the vigor of her research. Here she brings her talents to the chronicle of her own lineage and her discoveries of the commonalities that transcend generations. Supplemented by images of family memorabilia, Teddy's Child reveals the complex structures of race, class, and gender in a Deep South city during the 1920s and 1930s.
Reviews "Virginia Hamilton is best known as a stylish and influential historian, insightfully placing Alabama's role in our national history. Her memoir provides a thrilling—and highly entertaining—look at how this flinty free-thinker was forged in the Deep South of the 1920s and 1930s. Beyond its charms as a memoir, Teddy's Child is a poignant yet unsentimental chronicle of the underexplored American class diaspora. I have long been a huge fan of Dr. Hamilton's work. Now I thoroughly appreciate the person behind it." "This is a wonderful book. Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton has long been noted for her polished historical writing. Now she turns her literary skills to an enthralling personal history of her colorful, troubled family. Her account of that family's battle against hereditary anxiety and depression is unflinching, but also loving and inspiring. With the fine eye of a novelist, she also re-creates a lost time when Southern intellectuals struggled under the twin burdens of racism and oppressive moral codes." "Teddy's Child is finest candy. I simply couldn't stop eating—I mean reading. For anyone who is aware that family members, through several generations, re-live many of the same life patterns, despite changes in time and place, this book is a serious 'must read.' With the insight and honesty of a historian, Hamilton examines the romanticism, neuroses, joie de vivre, talents, and grit of her family in a way that helps any reader understand better his or her own family's tendencies. Hamilton's heritage thoroughly entertained me while enriching my own sense of family."
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