Family Conscience
A Memoir of Four Generations
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
FritzSearch.com earns a commission on purchases made through Bookshop.org links.
Publisher's Description
This memoir explores the role of conscience in four generations during a century of family history. It begins with the suicide of Barbour's maternal grandfather and the impact of this traumatic event. Later chapters describe his interactions with other grandparents, parents, two uncles, siblings, a former spouse, and two sons. Family Conscience depicts the values and patterns of self-assessment that members of this family share and also the ways their differing moral views have been influenced by interactions with one another. Barbour interprets how he and family members have understood work and vocation, religious commitments, political and economic values, choices about marriage and raising children, conflicts within the family, and other situations and issues. This thematic family memoir blends the genres of biography, oral interview, autobiography, essay, and cultural history as Barbour depicts how conscience was transmitted and transformed through the generations.
Endorsements (3)
“Family Conscience is an extraordinary memoir. Tracing the various manifestations of conscience in his Protestant Midwestern family over several generations, Barbour illuminates the way in which ‘family values,’ whether adopted or resisted, can persist and shape behavior for decades. At the same time, his book is an acute inquiry into—and demonstration of—the ethics of writing about one’s relatives. It is an impressive achievement.”
“Drawing on detailed interviews, journal entries, letters, and photographs, John Barbour intricately mines his family’s past for clues about how moral conscience develops. From host homes in India to work camps in Germany, this generational memoir investigates the places, events, conversations, and relationships that form our personal understanding of right and wrong. With compassion and curiosity, Barbour eloquently investigates how war, marriage, parenting, suicide, religion, community, and vocation affect the moral dimensions of one family. But Barbour is also acutely aware of the mutability of memory; woven through the book are his interrogations of his own writerly motives and his family’s mixed response to his observations. The result is a lucid, wise, and engaging memoir that offers a moving example of why searching for truth is both a fraught and necessary endeavor.”
“Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Family Conscience provides a genealogy of the values of four generations of an accomplished and morally aspiring clan. As honest as it is tender, Barbour’s study is rife with illuminating reflections on the nature of conscience considered as an amalgam of reason, desire, and history. Life’s moral complexity is brought home with engaging stories and the author’s willingness to give voice to relatives with conflicting perspectives on family history.”
See something wrong on this page? Report a problem