For someone who has vital connections to the Kentucky Bluegrass, New Orleans, and Birmingham, as I do, Virginia Hamilton's Teddy's Child: Growing Up in the Anxious Southern Gentry Between the Great Wars is finest candy. I simply couldn't stop eating--I mean reading. For anyone who is aware that family members, through several generations, re-live many of the same life patterns, despite changes in time and place, this book is a serious "must read." With the insight and honesty of a historian, Virginia Hamilton examines the romanticism, the neuroses, the joie de vivre, the talents, and the grit of her own family in a way that helps any reader understand better his or her own family's tendencies. Teddy's Child includes many fascinating characters remarkable for their beauty, athleticism, leadership ability, eccentricities and literary inclinations; their individual lives and entire eras are made vivid by newspaper clippings, family photographs, letters, and journals, as well as through Hamilton's memories and compelling descriptions. Coming to know Virginia Hamilton's heritage has thoroughly entertained me while enriching my own sense of family and of growing up in Birmingham. -- Sena Jeter Naslund , novelist, author of Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette, Four Spirits, and Ahab's Wife.