PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)US reviewers praised the book for transcending the autobiographical genre, weaving together the past of a family, a city, and a nation, expanding \'the collective understanding of American history\'. Her project and methods have been aligned with scholarly efforts in the last half-century to restore the record of experiences and legacies ignored or suppressed by a white-colonial perspective. While these are deserved accolades for a landmark achievement, they signpost no arduous journey for the reader ... Her strategy of allowing remembered remarks and scenes to speak for themselves has an especially striking effect in the portrayal of family members. An absence of the kind of condemnatory or approving appraisal that is often a driving feature of memoir generates a powerful sense of life – and of love, if the book were so sentimental – as a pattern of physical and psychical proximity ... In addition to the \'deadpan humour\' noted by her US reviewers, Broom’s sentences generate an absorbing enjoyment. Culminating moments of indictment rise to an incantatory lyricism ... not a book to consult for political prescriptions. At times it might leave the reader wondering whether the inner workings of municipal governance could ever really be elusive to quite the degree that Broom suggests ... Without any outline of the nature of relations between the state and private enterprise, her conclusions about what ought to have been done differently can seem merely wishful. But the memoir remains an engrossing account of the concrete realities, and dangerous chimeras, of what its author resonantly calls \'an unequal, masquerading world\'.
