Sometimes it's best to open an anthology with no prior warning; no introductions or explanations or justifications. If you start at the beginning of this one, you happen first upon Raymond Carver's starkly beautiful memoir of his father, Where He Was, followed by Saul Bellow's hilarious and affectionate piece, Memoirs of a Bootlegger's Son - and if you never ventured any further, it would be worth having this book in your possession for those just two extracts. But here is a whole album of vivid pen pictures, from Todd McEwan's deliberately out of focus portrait of his sister to Mona Simpson's snaps of her torrid encounter with the young Egyptian taxi driver who is supposed to be helping her find her father, to Mikal Gilmore's sobering hand held video of the life and death of his brother Gary. Family values? Read this, and the phrase will explode in your face.
