"Nick Lemann grew up always thinking he wanted to be Jack Burden, the ever-curious young reporter in Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning All the King's Men, who gets ineluctably drawn into the powerful web of southern Governor Willie Stark. Like his fictional mentor Burden, Lemann pulls us mesmerizingly into a three-century family, largely set in New Orleans, but also initially in Germany and in New York, in which the Lemann family over four generations are the protagonists. With their humble beginnings in Germany as Jews fleeing prejudice and poverty, the Lemanns arrived as peddlers in America in the 1830s, quickly moving to the South, where they were among a very small number of white plantation owners who were Jewish. And just like Jack Burden, Lemann finds himself wrestling with the rank contradictions posed by three generations of his forbears, all of them so eager to wipe out any trace of Judaism by seeking acceptance from the New Orlean Gentile ruling class. They banished any semblance of religion, opposed allowing desperate European Jews to enter America before WWII, and opposed their own grandchildren getting bar-mitzvaahed (calling it "child abuse"). Returning, as the title suggests, follows the narrator as he rejects the etiolated world of his parents and grandparents, choosing not to follow the so-called king's men of the Lemann family, but to embrace the actual rites of Judaism in a way unknown to three previous generations of Lemanns. In many ways a blanket rejection of Reformed Judaism, Returning is ultimately a celebration of the Jewish faith that was denied to Lemann, and through its combination of biography and philosophy, ultimately emerges as one of the most important statements about Judaism in the twenty-first century"-- Provided by publisher.