Download or read book My Father s Wake written by Kevin Toolis and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate, lyrical look at the ancient rite of the Irish wake--and the Irish way of overcoming our fear of death Death is a whisper for most of us. Instinctively we feel we should dim the lights, pull the curtains, and speak softly. But on a remote island off the coast of Ireland's County Mayo, death has a louder voice. Each day, along with reports of incoming Atlantic storms, the local radio runs a daily roll call of the recently departed. The islanders go in great numbers, young and old alike, to be with their dead. They keep vigil with the corpse and the bereaved company through the long hours of the night. They dig the grave with their own hands and carry the coffin on their own shoulders. The islanders cherish the dead--and amid the sorrow, they celebrate life, too. In My Father's Wake, acclaimed author and award-winning filmmaker Kevin Toolis unforgettably describes his own father's wake and explores the wider history and significance of this ancient and eternal Irish ritual. Perhaps we, too, can all find a better way to deal with our mortality -- by living and loving as the Irish do.

Download or read book Into My Father s Wake written by Eric Best and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Into my father's wake records a solo, 5,000-mile Pacific journey aboard the 47-foot ketch Feo, in which the author attempts to put his powerful father to rest once and for all"--Back cover

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 Arms are a Boat written by Stein Erik Lunde and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unable to sleep, a young boy climbs into his father's arms and asks about birds, foxes, and whether his mother will ever awaken, then under a starry sky, the father provides clear answers and assurances.

Download or read book My Father s Tears written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. John Updike mingles narratives of Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel: “Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”

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 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 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 Mother My Father written by Susan Wyndham and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2013 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of Australia's best known writers share their wise and searingly honest experiences of losing a parent.

Download or read book The Intentional Father written by Jon Tyson and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-initiation is killing our young men. Without strong mentors, boys are walking alone into a wilderness of conflicting messages about who they should be as men. It's no wonder that our sons are confused about what the world expects from them and what they should expect of themselves. The Intentional Father is the antidote. This concise book is filled with practical steps to help men raise sons of consequence--young men who know what they believe, know who they are, and will stand up against the negative cultural trends of our day. Jon Tyson lays out a clear path for fathers and sons that includes specific activities, rites of passage, and significant "marking moments" that can be customized to fit any family. It's not enough to hope our sons will become good men. We need them to be good at being men. This book shows how fathers, grandfathers, and other male mentors can lead the way.

Download or read book Song for My Fathers written by Tommy Sancton and published by Other Press (NY). This book was released on 2006 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in New Orleans in the 1950s and 1960s, Sancton's passionate memoir pays tribute to the white father who raised him and to the black founding fathers of Jazz, "the mens" of Preservation Hall, who inspired and encouraged him as he grew, as a musician, and as a man.

Download or read book The Song Poet written by Kao Kalia Yang and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “memorable and moving immigrant story” chronicles the life of the author’s father, a Hmong refugee and keeper of cultural memory (Booklist). Winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award in Creative Nonfiction A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses. He keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning memoir The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father, Bee Yang, the song poet—a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by America’s Secret War. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. The songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a St. Paul housing project and on the factory floor, until, with the death of Bee’s mother, they leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has burnished a life of poverty for his children, polishing their grim reality so that they might shine.

Download or read book Days with My Father written by Phillip Toledano and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Days With My Father is a son's photo journal of his aging father's last years. Following the death of his mother, photographer Phillip Toledano was shocked to learn of the extent of his father's severe memory loss. He started a blog on which he posted photographs and accompanying reflections on his father's changing state. Through sometimes sad, often funny, and always loving observations, we follow Toledano as he learns to reconcile the elderly man living in a twilight of half memories with the ambitious and handsome young man he occasionally still glimpses. Days With My Father is an honest and moving reflection about coming to terms with an aging parent.

Download or read book Notes on Grief written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father: “With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief … captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided” (The Washington Post). Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.

Download or read book Thirty Days with My Father written by Christal Presley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Before You Wake written by Erick Erickson and published by Center Point. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ten letters--featuring a wonderful mix of the practical, inspirational, and spiritual--about life's enduring values, based on a viral essay Erickson wrote for his children after he and his wife both faced grave medical situations"--

Download or read book Through My Father s Eyes written by Franklin Graham and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much more than a biography, this book takes an intimate look at Billy Graham's incredible life and unstoppable calling through the unique perspective of his son Franklin.