Screening Room
Family Pictures

From the acclaimed author of the international bestseller Einsteins Dreams, here is a lyrical memoir of Memphis from the 1930s through the 1960s: the music and the racism, the early days of the movies, and a powerful grandfather whose ghost continues to haunt the family. Alan Lightmans grandfather M. A. Lightman was the familys undisputed patriarch: it was his movie theater empire that catapulted the family to prominence in the South, his fearless success that both galvanized and paralyzed his descendants, haunting them for a half century after his death. In this lyrical and impressionistic memoir, Lightman writes about returning to Memphis in an attempt to understand the people he so eagerly left behind forty years earlier. As aging uncles and aunts begin telling family stories, Lightman rediscovers his southern roots and slowly realizes the errors in his perceptions of his grandfather and of his own father, who had been crushed by M. A. Here is a family saga set against a throbbing century of Memphisthe rhythm and blues, the barbecue and pecan pie, and the segregated societythat includes personal encounters with Elvis, Martin Luther King Jr., and E. H. Boss Crump. At the heart of it all is a family haunted by the ghost of the domineering M. A. and the struggle of the author to understand his conflicted loyalties to his father and grandfather.