The Fate of My Father


Book Description

Years after I was born, years after the war, my father told my mother that if he had been born just twenty years later, he could have done more with his life.




In My Father's Country


Book Description

Relates the author's decision, years after her father was taken away by the KGB, to relocate to her uncle's home in America, where she pursued an education and worked as an interpreter before becoming a cultural adviser for the U.S. Army.




The Death of My Father the Pope


Book Description

A man mourning his alcoholic father faces a paradox: to pay tribute, lay scorn upon, or pour a drink. A wrenching, dazzling, revelatory debut Weaving between the preparations for his father's funeral and memories of life on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border, Obed Silva chronicles his father's lifelong battle with alcoholism and the havoc it wreaked on his family. Silva and his mother had come north across the border to escape his father’s violent, drunken rages. His father had followed and danced dangerously in and out of the family’s life until he was arrested and deported back to Mexico, where he drank himself to death, one Carta Blanca at a time, at the age of forty-eight. Told with a wry cynicism, a profane, profound anger, an antic, brutally honest voice, and a hard-won classical frame of reference, Silva channels the heartbreak of mourning while wrestling with the resentment and frustration caused by addiction. The Death of My Father the Pope is a fluid and dynamic combination of memoir and an examination of the power of language—and the introduction of a unique and powerful literary voice.




Faith of My Fathers


Book Description

Senator John McCain learned about life and honor from his grandfather and father, both four-star admirals in the U.S. Navy. Both their careers and their courage helped prepare McCain for the biggest challenge of his life when, as a naval aviator, he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and seriously injured. When his captors realized McCain's impressive military legacy, they offered him early release. In what has now become a legendary act of heroism, McCain refused the offer and was subsequently tortured, held in solitary confinement, and imprisoned for more than five years. Faith of My Fathers is about what McCain learned from his father and grandfather, and how their example enabled him to survive. Told with humility, grace, and humor, it is a story of three imperfect men who faced adversity and emerged with their honor intact. It is a story to inspire and instruct, one that shows what fathers give to their sons, and what, ultimately, endures.




In My Father's Name


Book Description

On January 2, 1972, Mark Arax's childhood came to a sudden, explosive end when his father was shot to death at his nightclub in Fresno, California. It was one of the most sensational murders in California's heartland, and it was never solved. Mark, only fifteen years old at the time, was left with a legacy of questions: Were the rumors about his father true? Had he led a double life? Was he killed because of his dealings with the underworld? Mark Arax, an award-winning journalist at the Los Angeles Times, now writes a searing, intensely personal account of his twenty-two-year search for answers about his father's life and death, and his own identity. As the oldest child, Mark was thrust into the role of patriarch. His quest for answers began in high school, when he sought out his father's father, an Armenian immigrant. His grandfather opened a window into an old country world full of promise and heartbreak -- and four generations of eccentric family members. Two decades later, Mark uprooted his wife and baby and returned to Fresno under an assumed name to try and determine who killed his father and why. Fearing for his own life, he discovers his father was murdered just before he was going to make a startling disclosure. More than a true-life murder mystery, more than an exploration of family and culture, In My Father's Name is the poignant story of one man's remarkable journey as he uncovers long-hidden secrets about his father, his family, his heritage, and the town he once called home.




Who Killed My Father


Book Description

This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar E´douard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar Édouard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father. Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French—at the minimum—of negligent homicide. The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely fifty years old, who can hardly walk or breathe:“You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that. But hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love between father and son, once damaged by shame, poverty and homophobia. Yet tenderness reconciles them, even as the state is killing off his father. Louis goes after the French system with bare knuckles but turns to his long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.




My Father's Heart


Book Description

Sixteen-year-old Steve McKee watched his father die of a heart attack on the couch in their TV room. A lifelong smoker and workaholic, John McKee had been floored by a heart attack five years earlier. The McKee clan-perhaps including a demoralized John himself-had long been waiting for the other shoe to drop. At age fifty-two, Steve McKee learned that he was his father's son more than he had ever hoped-he, too, has serious cardiovascular disease. Haunted by his father's seeming surrender to the condition, McKee set out to find the man who died before the son could know him. In so doing, what might he, Steve McKee, learn of himself? Chronicling the disorienting first days following John McKee's death, My Father's Heart is an extraordinary story of an all-too-ordinary scenario: A father dies, a son remains, and the loss casts a long shadow across a generation. Rich in evocative detail of time, place, and family, it is a powerful memoir of love, forgiveness, and finding oneself.




Thirty Days with My Father


Book Description

When Christal Presley's father was eighteen, he was drafted to Vietnam. Like many men of that era who returned home with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), he was never the same. Christal's father spent much of her childhood locked in his room, gravitating between the deepest depression and unspeakable rage, unable to participate in holidays or birthdays. At a very young age, Christal learned to walk on eggshells, doing anything and everything not to provoke him, but this dance caused her to become a profoundly disturbed little girl. She acted out at school, engaged in self-mutilation, and couldn't make friends. At the age of eighteen, Christal left home and didn't look back. She barely spoke to her father for the next thirteen years. To any outsider, Christal appeared to be doing well: she earned a BA and a master's, got married, and traveled to India. But despite all these accomplishments, Christal still hadn't faced her biggest challenge—her relationship with her father. In 2009, something changed. Christal decided it was time to begin the healing process, and she extended an olive branch. She came up with what she called "The Thirty Day Project," a month's worth of conversations during which she would finally ask her father difficult questions about Vietnam. Thirty Days with My Father is a gritty yet heartwarming story of those thirty days of a daughter and father reconnecting in a way that will inspire us all to seek the truth, even from life's most difficult relationships. This beautifully realized memoir shares how one woman and her father discovered profound lessons about their own strength and will to survive, shedding an inspiring light on generational PTSD.




Angels Don't Die


Book Description

Ronald Reagan's political career and his status as a cultural icon have been observed from every angle, but his role as a father to his daughter has been seen only in the harsh light of Patti's well-publicized tensions with Nancy Reagan. But now Patti Davis has reconciled with her mother and the catalyst was Angels Don't Die. In fact, her parents were so touched by the book they have contributed introductory comments. Angels Don't Die is a moving tribute to Ronald Reagan's spiritual strength and offers an intimate portrait that will appeal to people everywhere who admire the Reagans as well as to anyone contending with the challenges of parent-child relationships. Putting aside past hurts and misunderstandings, Patti Davis writes lyrically of the lessons she learned from watching her father cope with the various crises in his life. She writes of his forgiveness of John Hinckley, Reagan's would-be assassin, and of his near-death experience following surgery. She reveals Ronald Reagan to be a simple, quietly heroic man whose faith in God has never wavered.




Dreams from My Father


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World). “Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Praise for Dreams from My Father “Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”—Scott Turow “Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”—The New York Times Book Review “Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place “Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”—Marian Wright Edelman