Download or read book My Father Before Me written by Chris Forhan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning poet’s “beautifully written” (The Seattle Times) portrait of an American family and his own coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s in the wake of his father’s suicide. This memoir “belongs on the special shelves we keep for the books we cannot quite forget” (George Hodgman). The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of secrets. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn’t come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but unspoken. And on a cold night just before Christmas 1973, long after dinner, the rest of the family asleep, Forhan’s father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later, Forhan “excavates both his lost father and a lost era in American history” (Bookpage). At the heart of this “fiercely honest” (Nick Flynn) investigation is Forhan’s father, a man whose crisp suits and gelled hair belied a darkness he could not control, a man whose striking dichotomy embodied the ethos of an era. Weaving together the lives of his ancestors, his parents, and his own coming of age in the 60s and 70s, Forhan paints an “achingly beautiful” (Buffalo News) portrait of a family “in the tradition of Geoffrey Wolff” (Booklist). “Poignant…affecting…Forhan describes his family’s healing and acceptance with warmth, humor, and an admirable lack of bitterness” (Kirkus Reviews). A family history, an investigation into a death, and a stirring portrait of an Irish Catholic childhood, all set against a backdrop of America from the Great Depression to the Ramones, My Father Before Me is “an exquisite example of the power of honesty” (Jeannette Walls), “a wonderfully engrossing book…essential for all parents and children, that is, all people” (Library Journal, starred review).
Download or read book My Father Before Me written by Michael J. Diamond and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book establishes fatherhood as an essential event for both the father and son's development and examines the relationship throughout the life cycle.
Download or read book My Father Before Me written by Catherine Kanhema?Blinston and published by Author House. This book was released on 2013 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventy years after the establishment of Rhodesia by the European settlers, a little girl was born to an activist. Her father fought to establish a one man, one vote system. He was arrested and imprisoned for ten years. The girl was ecstatic to have her father back until she realized that he had become a stranger to her. My Father before Me is a vivid journey through Catherine Kanhema-Blinston's early life. It chronicles her life in the midst of poverty, war, and prison camps. Her happiest moments during her childhood were the fun, light-hearted times she shared with her big family and the bonds she formed with her siblings during her outdoor adventures. These pleasant memories create a sharp contrast to the instability faced by a young girl growing up as a political activist's daughter.
Download or read book Jesus My Father the CIA and Me written by Ian Morgan Cron and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A touching memoir of life with an alcoholic father who secretly works with the CIA, a dark pilgrimage through the valley of depression and addiction, and finding a faith to redeem and a strength to forgive. "This is a record of my life as I remember it—but more importantly, as I felt it." At the age of sixteen, Ian Morgan Cron was told by his mother that his father, a motion picture executive, worked with the CIA in Europe. This astonishing revelation, coupled with his father's dark struggle with alcoholism, upended the world of a teenager struggling to become a man. Born into a family of privilege and power, Ian's life is populated with colorful people and stories as his father takes the family on a wild roller-coaster ride through wealth and poverty and back again. Decades later, as he faced his own personal demons, Ian realized that the only way to find peace was to voyage back through a painful childhood marked by extremes—privilege and poverty, violence and tenderness, truth and deceit—that he’d spent years trying to escape. A fast-paced, unique memoir about the power of forgiveness from the bestselling author of The Road Back to You Details his father’s struggle with alcohol and Cron’s own journey from addiction to twenty-three years of sobriety Encouragement to see God’s redemptive power through life’s struggles In this surprisingly funny and forgiving memoir, Ian reminds us that no matter how different the pieces may be, in the end we are all cut from the same cloth, stitched by faith into an exquisite quilt of grace.
Download or read book Reading My Father written by Alexandra Styron and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reading My Father" is an intimate, moving, and beautifully written portrait of the novelist William Styron by his daughter, Alexandra.
Download or read book My Father Left Me Ireland written by Michael Brendan Dougherty and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The perfect gift for parents this Father’s Day: a beautiful, gut-wrenching memoir of Irish identity, fatherhood, and what we owe to the past. “A heartbreaking and redemptive book, written with courage and grace.” –J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy “…a lovely little book.” –Ross Douthat, The New York Times The child of an Irish man and an Irish-American woman who split up before he was born, Michael Brendan Dougherty grew up with an acute sense of absence. He was raised in New Jersey by his hard-working single mother, who gave him a passion for Ireland, the land of her roots and the home of Michael's father. She put him to bed using little phrases in the Irish language, sang traditional songs, and filled their home with a romantic vision of a homeland over the horizon. Every few years, his father returned from Dublin for a visit, but those encounters were never long enough. Devastated by his father's departures, Michael eventually consoled himself by believing that fatherhood was best understood as a check in the mail. Wearied by the Irish kitsch of the 1990s, he began to reject his mother's Irish nationalism as a romantic myth. Years later, when Michael found out that he would soon be a father himself, he could no longer afford to be jaded; he would need to tell his daughter who she is and where she comes from. He immediately re-immersed himself in the biographies of firebrands like Patrick Pearse and studied the Irish language. And he decided to reconnect with the man who had left him behind, and the nation just over the horizon. He began writing letters to his father about what he remembered, missed, and longed for. Those letters would become this book. Along the way, Michael realized that his longings were shared by many Americans of every ethnicity and background. So many of us these days lack a clear sense of our cultural origins or even a vocabulary for expressing this lack--so we avoid talking about our roots altogether. As a result, the traditional sense of pride has started to feel foreign and dangerous; we've become great consumers of cultural kitsch, but useless conservators of our true history. In these deeply felt and fascinating letters, Dougherty goes beyond his family's story to share a fascinating meditation on the meaning of identity in America.
Download or read book The Story of My Father written by Sue Miller and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fall of 1988, Sue Miller found herself caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer's disease. She was, she claims, perhaps the least constitutionally suited of all her siblings to be in the role in which she suddenly found herself, and in The Story of My Father she grapples with the haunting memories of those final months and the larger narrative of her father's life. With compassion, self-scrutiny, and an urgency born of her own yearning to rescue her father's memory from the disorder and oblivion that marked his dying and death, Sue Miller takes us on an intensely personal journey that becomes, by virtue of her enormous gifts of observation, perception, and literary precision, a universal story of fathers and daughters. James Nichols was a fourth-generation minister, a retired professor from Princeton Theological Seminary. Sue Miller brings her father brilliantly to life in these pages-his religious faith, his endless patience with his children, his gaiety and willingness to delight in the ridiculous, his singular gifts as a listener, and the rituals of church life that stayed with him through his final days. She recalls the bitter irony of watching him, a church historian, wrestle with a disease that inexorably lays waste to notions of time, history, and meaning. She recounts her struggle with doctors, her deep ambivalence about many of her own choices, and the difficulty of finding, continually, the humane and moral response to a disease whose special cruelty it is to dissolve particularities and to diminish, in so many ways, the humanity of those it strikes. She reflects, unforgettably, on the variable nature of memory, the paradox of trying to weave a truthful narrative from the threads of a dissolving life. And she offers stunning insight into her own life as both a daughter and a writer, two roles that swell together here in a poignant meditation on the consolations of storytelling. With the care, restraint, and consummate skill that define her beloved and best-selling fiction, Sue Miller now gives us a rigorous, compassionate inventory of two lives, in a memoir destined to offer comfort to all sons and daughters struggling-as we all eventually must-to make peace with their fathers and with themselves.
Download or read book My Father s Angels written by Gloria Gaither and published by Zonderkidz. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By award-winning author and lyricist, Gloria Gaither The companion picture books My Father’s Angels, Ordinary Baby, Extraordinary Gift and I Am a Promise all come with a bonus CD, making a trio of great music, inspiring lyrics, and dazzling art. My Father’s Angels—This story reminds young hearts that God’s heavenly protectors are always at hand. The words to Gloria Gaither’s wonderful, reassuring song and enchanting artwork weave a promising message that children can sing along to, with CD included. Ordinary Baby, Extraordinary Gift—In this heartwarming story, celebrated author and award-winning lyricist Gloria Gaither makes use of her song “Ordinary Baby” as the basis to share the timeless truth of Jesus’ birth and life. Written in a way that is simple and easy to understand, children can read along with the CD. Ordinary Baby makes known the story of not just why Jesus came, but why he chose to come to earth as a baby. With its vibrant and engaging illustrations,Ordinary Baby, Extraordinary Gift is certain to become one of your child’s most treasured books, with CD included. I Am a Promise—Because every child is full of promise, potential, and possibility, kids can be assured that with God’s help they can become anything he wants them to be. Beautiful full-color art will delight young readers as they sing along with the music on the bonus CD. GLORIA GAITHER is an award-winning lyricist, author, scriptwriter, former adjunct professor of songwriting at Anderson University, recording artist with the celebrated Gaither Trio for thirty years, mother, and grandmother. Gloria and her husband, Bill, live in Alexandria, IN.
Download or read book Give Me My Father s Body written by Kenn Harper and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-02-27 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing, true tale of extraordinary darkness, Harper's critically acclaimed history is an absorbing and poignant portrait of the short, strange, and tragic life of the boy known as the New York Eskimo. Two 16-page photo inserts and one 8-page insert.
Download or read book My Father is a Book written by Janna Malamud Smith and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bernard Malamud was one of the most accomplished American novelists of the postwar years. From the Pulitzer Prize winner The Fixer as well as The Assistant, named one of the best "100 All–Time Novels" by Time Magazine—to mention only two of the more than a dozen published books—he not only established himself in the first rank of American writers but also took the country's literature in new and important directions. In her signature memoir, Smith explores her renowned father's life and literary legacy. Malamud was among the most brilliant novelists of his era, and counted among his friends Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Theodore Roethke, and Shirley Jackson. Yet Malamud was also very private. Only his family has had full access to his personal papers, including letters and journals that offer unique insight into the man and his work. In her candid, evocative, and loving memoir, his daughter brings Malamud to vivid life.
Download or read book My Father the Pornographer written by Chris Offutt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir in which "writer Chris Offutt struggles to understand his recently deceased father based on his reading of the 400-plus novels [Andrew Offutt]--a well-known writer of pornography in the 1970s and 80s--left him in his will"--Publisher marketing.
Download or read book Mining for Gold written by Tom Camacho and published by Inter-Varsity Press. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Godly thriving leaders are precious and valuable, but developing those leaders is not easy. Many leaders feel stuck, tired and frustrated in their growth and calling. This can change. In Mining for Gold, pastor and master-coach, Tom Camacho, offers a fresh perspective on how to draw out the best in ourselves and in those around us. Cutting through the complexity and challenges of leadership development, he gives us practical and effective tools to help leaders grow personally and develop those around them. Coaching, through the power of the Holy Spirit, provides the clarity and momentum we need to grow. When we get clarity, everything changes. Coaching helps us better understand our identity in Christ, our God-given wiring, and how we naturally bear the most fruit. There is gold in God’s people, waiting to be discovered. Let’s learn to draw out that treasure and help others flourish in their life and leadership.
Download or read book Things My Father Taught Me written by Claire Halliday and published by Echo Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stern, playful, encouraging, hard-working, tough or loving � no matter how we describe our own father, he leaves an indelible imprint. Claire Halliday spoke with a range of well-known Australians who shared their stories about the way their dads shape their lives. From memories of deep warmth and closeness to stories of difficulty and tragedy � everyones story is unique.
Download or read book Dreams from My Father written by Barack Obama and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-01-09 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #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
Download or read book My Father s Island written by Johanna Angermeyer and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chasing the Hawk written by Andrew Sheehan and published by Delta. This book was released on 2002-10-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I have always chased my father, chased after his love, chased him through his many changes. I chased him even when I thought I was running in the other direction. Today, even though he is gone, I chase him still. I know he is the key to my freedom.” To runners around the world, Dr. George Sheehan, author of the landmark New York Times bestseller Running and Being, was nothing short of a guru — the country’s “greatest philosopher of sport.” But to his son Andrew, who had spent his entire boyhood longing for the attention and approval of an emotionally distant father, he was an incomprehensible paradox: a lifelong loner, who was now sunning himself in the spotlight of the nation’s press; a hero to millions, who seemed to have no time for his own son. The events that transformed George Sheehan from doctor to family man to bestselling author and media magnet began at the depths of what we would now call a midlife crisis, when he rediscovered an old love — running. Twenty-five years after his days on a high school cross-country team, he remembered how running made him feel free, and began beating a solitary path down his suburban streets. With running as his new religion, the formerly quiet, withdrawn man became an unlikely evangelist, converting a sedentary nation to the theology of fitness, and in the process becoming an internationally known figure. But the freedom he found in running was not enough, and one day he left his family, having decided that life was “an experiment of one,” and it was time for him to start living it. Angry and disillusioned after years of enduring his father’s self-absorption, and hurt by his apparent indifference, Andrew had long since begun the search for his own version of freedom, looking first to drugs and later to alcohol. By his twenties he was a confirmed alcoholic. By his thirties his marriage had fallen apart and he was drinking more heavily than ever. It was at that moment that his father threw him a lifeline. Although he was struggling with the cancer that would eventually end his life, Dr. Sheehan was the first to notice his son’s pain, and to reach out to him. In this stunningly candid book, Andrew Sheehan describes the process through which these two men carefully and lovingly rebuilt their relationship. And in the effort to understand and forgive the dark side of his father’s psyche, Andrew shows how he came to understand, and to transcend, his own. A gracefully written paean to the healing power of forgiveness, a memoir that will resonate with any “fallible” parent or child, Chasing the Hawk traces the arduous steps that carry father and son down the hard road to resolution, healing, and love.
Download or read book My Father Before Me written by Chris Forhan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. His mother and father often sat in the same room but exchanged no words. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn't come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but unspoken. And on a cold night just before Christmas 1973, long after dinner, the rest of the family asleep, Forhan's father killed himself in the garage--a new silence. Forty years later, Chris speaks into the quiet his father left behind, digging into his family's past and finding within each generation the same abandonment, loss, and silence in which he was raised. Like Ian Frazier in Family or Philip Roth in American Pastoral, Forhan shows his family as both a part and a product of its time. My Father Before Me is a family history, an investigation into a death, and a stirring portrait of an Irish Catholic childhood, all set against a backdrop of America from the Great Depression to Elvis Costello. Lucidly and unflinchingly, Forhan attempts to understand his father and ultimately himself in order to avoid passing his family's silence on to his children. To separate this silence from the introversion that inspires him as a writer, he courageously confronts it, telling the story that his family will not tell, and piecing together the fragments of the life that his father chose to leave"--Provided by publisher.
