Princeton Alumni Weekly Podcasts

In 1960, the lives of three men born to immigrant families during the Great Depression collided. A doctor helped a prisoner get paroled, and then that prisoner shot and killed a police officer. Many years later, journalist Lisa Belkin, Princeton Class of 1982, heard this story from the doctor, who had recently become her stepfather, and she had a question: How? How did one of these men become the cop, one the killer, and one the doctor? To find out, she traced the families of all three men back through four generations — through births and marriages, wars, historical events and major cultural shifts that shaped the lives of Americans in the 20th century. Then she wrote it all down and titled her new book “Genealogy of a Murder.” In it, she writes, “We have less power over who we are now than we believe, and much more power over the future than we think.”