Joseph Lelyveld's Omaha Bluesuses memory as a resource for the stories of his family and his childhood, but recollection is not his sole concern. In flawless, understated prose, he seeks to revise the memories he has, through investigation, pilgrimage, and rumination. He refers to "the serpentine course of these pages," adding, "History may be linear but memory, at least mine, isn't; it runs in loops." Despite this warning, the structure of the work is far from disorienting. Rather, the reader is swept through the repetitions of Lelyveld's personal struggles: his move from city to city as the son of a busy rabbi and a mother who writhed against the constraints of her maternal responsibilities. He describes entering his "fourth in school in four years [É] in third grade as an immigrant from Omaha by way of Brooklyn [...] Inevitably, Omaha faded fast as a real place in my memory, but I clung to it for purposes of self-definition. Emptied of all other content, the word ÔOmaha' came to have a private meaning for me. It meant I'm not really from this place, Manhattan."

Throughout the book, Lelyveld longs for his father's presence and attention, but this desire is mixed with his disavowal of sentimentality. "[...] I wasn't touched or curious or anyway receptive when, three decades after my parents' divorce, my octogenarian father sent me a packet of love letters between him and my mother that he'd hidden away," he says. Nonetheless, the process of writing Omaha Bluesrequires a great deal of rifling through aged texts Ð whether they are photographs (some of which he includes in the book), letters, or his own remembrances. Lelyveld returns to the Nebraska farm where he was sent one summer as a child; he finds an old friend from childhood, in order to compare the details of particular events in their common past.

There is a self-conscious quality to the writing that serves it well, a willingness to delineate exactly what the piece should be. "[I]f this were a novel trying to get inside its characters, I'd feel compelled to supply my dad and myself with clear motives. But these often turn out to be untraceable in our lives as we happened to live them." It is this graceful acknowledgment of the limits of verisimilitude that emphasizes what is already clear: Lelyveld will not impose meaning or emotion where it did not truly exist. When the reader is moved Ð by Lelyveld's account of his mother's suicide attempts, or his claim that he and his father "never quarreled and seldom got close" Ð there is no suggestion of authorial manipulation. Lelyveld's references to his career at the New York Times are few enough to avoid dominating the book, but rich enough to have a sense of his life as a journalist. He writes, "You see, I've been [...] indulging the urge pathetic old folks baffled by life's swift passage sometimes feel to find out what actually happened when they were too young or too stunned to take it all in." He does so with affection and great wit, and though he may no longer be "too stunned" to explore his memories, they are striking enough to demand the reader's attention.