Hannah Nordhaus

KIRKUS REVIEWA journalist?s account of how she went in search of the true story behind her great-great-grandmother?s life and ghostly reappearances almost a century after her mysterious death.Julia Staab was a member of the Nordhaus family tree and also ?Santa Fe?s most famous ghost.? Born to a well-to-do Jewish family in Germany in the mid-1840s, Julia eventually married a fellow German Jew who went on to become one of Santa Fe?s most prominent and scandal-ridden businessmen. As a child, Nordhaus (The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America, 2011) knew of Julia as one ancestor among others. It was only when she learned that her great-great-grandmother had begun haunting the La Posada Hotel¥which had once been the Staab family mansionÂ¥that ?Julia stopped being quite so dead.? Many years later, Nordhaus came across a family history that told a fascinating story of ?forbidden love, inheritance and disinheritance, anger and madness.? Suddenly, understanding Julia?s life took on new importance, especially since the specter of personal loss had begun to cast a shadow over Nordhaus. A trained historian, the author tracked down information about Julia, the Staab family and the worlds they inhabited in archives and libraries and through testing her own DNA. The objective evidence she gathered pointed to an unhappy marriage to a solicitous but dictatorial man, a possible liaison with a powerful archbishop and an attempted suicide. Determined to also understand Julia at an emotional and spiritual level, Nordhaus also turned to psychics, mediums and ghost hunters for information. She ultimately discovered that the truth about Julia and her life did not reside in the facts but rather in the spaces between facts: In the end, she writes, those spaces contain the details ?that tell us who we are.?A thoughtful and intriguing chronicle of familial investigation.Pub Date: March 10th, 2015ISBN: 978-0-06-224921-0Page count: 336ppPublisher: Harper/HarperCollinsReview Posted Online: Dec. 6th, 2014Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15th, 2014My first read for Castle Rock Thursday evening book club on 4/21/16. An excellent read.… (altro)

The author's great-great-grandmother, Julia Staab, is said to haunt her old house, now a hotel in Santa Fe. The ghost stories talk of abuse and insanity, contrary to family lore, so she decides to see if she can track down the truth about her supposedly restless ancestor. All her substantial information comes from traditional sources - newspaper articles, diaries, other archives - but she also tries alternative methods, including ghost hunters and psychics. These yield interesting speculation but nothing especially helpful. That said, the rest of the book is quite interesting. It's the story of an American family: German Jews who immigrated in the 1800s and made their fortune, and what later became of them and their descendants. There are a couple of side journeys about cousins and aunts and uncles, including an especially moving part about a relative lost in the Holocaust, but it all weaves together into a single family history. The ending, which returns to the spiritualist side of things, was a tad hokey for my taste, but on the whole it was an engaging look at society life in Victorian New Mexico. Recommended.… (altro)