A Family Trust [Paperback]

Ward Just (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 6, 2001

Jonathan Yardley called A Family Trust "his longest, his most ambitious and his best… a book with serious purposes that manages to entertain at the same time…rich in carefully observed details, in quick, sharp perceptions that reveal more than one at first understands…a fine, satisfying, rewarding book, the work of a mature and accomplished novelist," upon the book's initial publication in 1978. The passing of Amos Rising, town elder and editor of The Dement Intelligencer, leaves the Rising family without a patriarch and the town with a hole in its center. The ambitions and talents of the Risings, the changing face of the town and the life of the spirited, intelligent, and attractive Dana Rising fill the pages of this extraordinary novel. Ward Just's A Family Trust is about the public face and private souls of America's Heartland in the same way his other novels are about Germany, Vietnam, or Washington D.C.

The time has come to bring A Family Trust back into print.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ward Just is the author of twelve novels, including, most recently, A Dangerous Friend, the National Book Award finalist Echo House, and Jack Gance. His groundbreaking book about Vietnam, To What End, is available from PublicAffairs. Just was recently named one of the first recipients of a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy. He lives in Martha's Vineyard with his wife, Sarah Catchpole.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs (March 6, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586480340
• ISBN-13: 978-1586480349
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #266,265 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

WARD JUST is the author of fifteen previous novels, including the National Book Award finalist Echo House, A Dangerous Friend, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for fiction from the Society of American Historians, and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award and a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Just" read it, March 8, 2010

By 

Rand Careaga "Rand Careaga" (Oakland CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Family Trust (Paperback)

It's been almost forty years since I first encountered Dement, a bustling Illinois burg an hour or so west of Chicago, in Ward Just's 1972 novella "Honor, Power, Riches, Fame and the Love of Women," and I was delighted to visit it again when I purchased a remaindered copy of "A Family Trust" in 2008. This is an old-fashioned family saga, treating and tracing the changing fortunes of the town and its people over the course of three lengthy episodes--1953, 1960 and 1973--through the lens of Dement's home-grown newspaper "dynasty." Neither the family nor the town traverse the two decades unchanged, of course, and much of the journey is seen through the eyes of the patriarch's granddaughter, described by my spouse as one of the few plausible female characters she's ever read from the hand of a male novelist (me, I thought I'd seen plenty, but what do I know?).

Ward Just is one of our finest contemporary novelists, for all that he has somehow contrived to remain largely beneath the popular radar over the course of a long career. I'd recommend this one and "Jack Gance" to start with, and the short story collection "The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert" (which includes "Honor, Power") as between them a proper introduction to this under-celebrated writer. After that, just about any of his other titles are safe bets.