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Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir.

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Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir. By John Hemingway. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2007. 219 pp. Cloth. $24.95.

Given the myriad memoirs and biographies by Hemingway family members--books by Ernest's siblings Leicester (My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, 1962), Marcelline (At the Hemingways, 1962), and Madelaine (Ernie: Hemingway's Sister "Sunny" Remembers, 1975), wife number two, Martha Gellhorn (Travels with Myself and Another, 1978), wife number four, Mary Welsh (How It Was, 1976), sons Jack (Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman: My Life With and Without Papa, 1986) and Gregory (Papa: A Personal Memoir, 1988), daughter-in-law Valerie (Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways, 2004), granddaughter Lorian (Walk on Water: A Memoir, 1998), and niece Hilary (Hunting with Hemingway, 2000 and Hemingway in Cuba, 2003)--the reader who greets with skepticism this new family memoir by Ernest's grandson John might easily be forgiven. But if readers doubt that anything remains to be learned about Ernest and the Hemingways from a grandson who never met his famous grandfather (Ernest died before John was a year old), they are in for a welcome surprise. John Hemingway, son of Ernest's youngest son, Gregory, has written a remarkable and ambitious book.

The author's childhood, lived in the shadow of his celebrated grandfather and spent shuttling between his schizophrenic mother, his bipolar and cross-dressing father, and his generous, eccentric granduncle, Leicester, is rich enough material for any memoir. Yet John blends this story with a biography of his father, a study of his father's relationship with Ernest, and...

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