Mindy Thompson Fullilove offers a series of meditations on her remarkable family and the places where they have lived. She lovingly recalls her parents: her father, a black leader of the labor movement, and her mother, a white woman whose boundless generosity was always in conflict with the racial divisions of the world around her. "Place" is a major actor in her family story, and in the course of bringing the backgrounds of six generations into the foreground, Fullilove uncovers the many lives--her own included--that are rooted in those places.

Mindy Thompson Fullilove is a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia University and a research psychiatrist for the New York State Psychiatric Institute.