No Other Land

A superb portrait of family life, THE TENDER LAND is a love story unlike any other. The Finnerans – parents and five children, Irish Catholics in St. Louis – are a seemingly unexceptional family. Theirs is a story seldom told, yet it makes manifest how rich and truly extraordinary the ordinary daily experience we take for granted is. In quietly luminous language, Kathleen Finneran renders the emotional, spiritual, and physical terrain of family life – its closeness and disconnection, its intimacy and estrangement–and pays tribute to the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters.

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from.