The Lowells of Massachusetts: An American Family by Nina Sankovitch

St. Martin’s Press, 2017

Move over David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Here comes author Nina Sankovitch with an epic saga centered on the Lowell family of Massachusetts. The richly researched history is an important microcosm for books like McCollough’s John Adams, Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga, and Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life.

Sankovitch takes us through five centuries of a family steeped in civic leadership, the ministry, the mills, the American Revolution, capitalism, poetry, the Civil War, abolition, strikes and suffrage for women. Sankovitch’s writing is poetic, bringing the characters and content to light in a compelling way. Her insights into the motivations and emotions of those she writes about are thought provoking. Her rendering of grief  borne by family members who lost sons in the Civil War is heart wrenching.

Sankovitch is an artist at setting the scenes of everyday life in vivid detail — from mourning cherished possessions left behind, the creaking and moaning sounds of a ship at sea, the sun filtering though curtains in a home library — to the scent of lilacs in the gardens of an estate at Sevenels.

The book is full of historical surprises, such as Massachusetts abolitionists moving to Kansas to help sway the vote against slavery. A single read through doesn’t do this book justice. It must be savored and set among one’s treasured volumes.

— Gina Ryan