This is a massive book. Not only it's endurance of pages able to sustain rigorous thought but the ambition of its intellectual reach. Stepanova passionately covers a wide range of topics relating to memory, identity, history, philosophy, and on and on all stemming from a single project: the unearthing of her late Aunt's collection of family photographs, diaries, and scraps of correspondence.

There probably comes a time in everyone's life when the urge to look into ancestry begins calling. Stepanova has shown is the best of what can happen when one heeds that call.