Luc Sante's memoir/history features the same elegant, faintly sardonic prose that distinguished his first book, Low Life. Born in Belgium in 1954, transplanted to New Jersey at age 5, he intermingles evocative material about his familial and national past with glimpses of his American experiences. Sante's not one to bare his soul, but the cumulative effect of his impressionistic technique is revealing: when he describes the hallmarks of his natal land as "ambivalence, invisibility, secretiveness, self-doubt, passivity, irony, and derision," we infer that these traits also form the author's essence.