Nicholas Lemann — Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries
Journalist and author Nicholas Lemann traces his family's intertwined roots to explore the meaning of home across three centuries of American life.
Why we picked this
Lemann was dean of Columbia Journalism and wrote the definitive book on the Great Migration. Here he turns the lens inward, tracing his own family across three centuries.
Nicholas Lemann has spent his career as a journalist and historian examining American social structures — from The Promised Land, his landmark account of the Great Migration, to his work as dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In Returning, he turns inward, tracing his own family’s history across three centuries to ask a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to belong to a place?
The book weaves personal memoir with social history, following the threads of displacement, resettlement, and attachment that define the American relationship with home. At the New York Society Library, one of the city’s oldest cultural institutions, Lemann discusses the book in hybrid format.