Madness and Desire

The second book in my little stack of Sedgwick histories is called In My Blood: Madness and Desire in an American Family (HarperCollins, c. 2007). Written by John Sedgwick, another descendant of Judge Theodore Sedgwick and a cousin of Edie, this book is a study of what seems to be a genetic predisposition to manic depression in the Sedgwick family. But it's much more than that. It's a personal history, a family history and, in the telling of Theodore's story, a history of the early days of this country. However, it's quite unlike any dry, boring history book you might have had to choke down in school. Dare I call it a page-turner?

Yeah, why not? I turned every page, and as you may already know, I am not usually much of a reader, most especially of anything one might read about in a history class. But where your history textbook might tell you about what happened to an army, this book tells you about what happened to a guy. One particular guy. And history textbook readers may find this hard to believe, but the guy had a wife (or three!) and a mess o' kids! And personal drama! Yes, Virginia, there were real people involved in the American Revolution! Who knew?

The story of Theodore Sedgwick (1746-1813), his marriages, and his children fills the first half of this 400-page book, and their story is laid upon a framework of American nation-building that the patriarch of this family took part in. The remainder of the book follows succeeding generations and the legacy of ambition and madness handed down until it reached the author himself. A descendancy chart at the front of the book helps the reader keep track of who's who.

Due in part to the historical prominence of the Sedgwick family, great huge volumes of paperwork--documents, letters, published materials--have been preserved. John Sedgwick did an enormous amount of research for this work, and then somehow managed to make it read like a novel.

Despite the theme of manic depression which unifies the two-and-a-half-century timespan of individual histories in this book, I enjoyed reading it much more than the book I wrote about last week. My only wish is that there had been more than the fourteen photographs which were included. I was glad I hadn't returned Edie: An American Biography to the library yet, as there were about three dozen relevant family photographs in the first third of that book.

I enthusiastically recommend In My Blood not only to Sedgwick descendants but to anyone interested in an up-close, personal view of the American Revolution era, to genealogists and family historians who hope to write a family history of their own, and to anyone interested in mental health issues that have a genetic component.