Book Description
Paul O'Neill was the undisputed heart and soul of the four-time World Series-winning New York Yankees from 1993 to 2001. O'Neill epitomized the team's motto of hard work and good sportsmanship, traits instilled in him by his friend, confidant, lifelong model, and biggest fan: his dad, Chick O'Neill.
In Me and My Dad, O'Neill writes from the heart about the man who inspired in him a love for the game and a determination to always play his best. O'Neill remembers the highlights of his own amazing career: the Cincinnati Reds calling him up to the majors, his first World Series, being traded to the Yankees -- and taking part in their recent championship wins. He also reflects on his father's untimely death during the 1999 World Series and on the farewell tribute his fans gave him during his last game in Yankee Stadium.
Customer Reviews:
Paul O'Neill and Chatwithastar.com.......2006-08-22
Mr. Burton Rocks, just wanted to thank you for this amazing work on Yankee baseball player Paul O'Neill. In these days of controversy on Barry Bonds and Pete Rose in baseball, it is refreshing to see sucyh a positive work on a Yankees player like Paul O'Neill. Contratulations and best of luck with your new blogging launch that's puts players like Paul O'Neill in touch with their fans at [...]
A nice tribute to his father, but not much else.......2006-04-26
While I can respect the idea of this book as a tribute to his father, I can't recommend it as an entertaining read. Paul O'Neill was a decent ballplayer with the Reds who became a great ballplayer with the Yankees, but he's pretty dull no matter what uniform he wears. This was a nice idea, but check it out of the library unless you live and die Paul O'Neill.
There's More to This Man..........2006-01-07
I am a Cincinnati Reds fan and will always associate Paul O'Neill with the Cincinnati Reds and not the Yankees. After all, he grew up in the Columbus, OH area and identified the Reds as his favorite team since childhood. He has also chosen to settle with his family in the Cincinnati area since retiring. The book is a wonderful exploration of the father/son relationship and reveals a human side of Paul O'Neill that we didn't always get to see on the field.
This is a good book!.......2005-04-29
This book is about Paul O'Neill and his relationship with his father. His relationship included the life lessons that his father taught him while they were on the diamond. Remember, it is important to have this relationship with a special family member so that you always would have somebody to talk to. I personally enjoyed this book and loved reading it. The book was kind of fuzzy throughout some parts. By this I mean, that some of the book was filled with filler. The book then went on to talk about how his father was important while he was on the road for a long time. In addition, while he was on his way to the majors. It is evident that Paul is a great author and he has great writing abilities. Finally, I would just like to say that this was an all-around great book!
Limited Appeal.......2005-01-31
Me and My Dad is Paul O'Neill's tribute to his late father Chuck O'Neill. The book takes you through Paul's life from playing homerun derby in his backyard as a child, to playing in the World Series as a New York Yankee. He places emphasis on his fathers influence and wisdom he shared with him through the many troubles he had in life. Throughout the book Paul tells us about his experiences and how his father could always put a positive spin on everything by relating life to baseball, or baseball to life. The book helps to give the reader a deeper and simpler look at professional athletes.
While it is a must read for any Yankee or Paul O'Neill fan, I can not recommend it to anyone else. Even for a baseball fan like myself it has limited appeal. It is short and not very well written; some parts seem to drag on and on about nothing. Yankee fans will love it just to get a deeper understanding of one of their better players, but others will laugh at Paul's girlyness and grow to dislike him by the end. Because of these reasons, I can only recommend this book to Yankee fans, and possibly women who like to see the softer and more sensitive side of men.
Book Description
When his father died, J. R. Ackerley was shocked to discover that he had led a secret life. And after Ackerley himself died, he left a surprise of his own—this coolly considered, unsparingly honest account of his quest to find out the whole truth about the man who had always eluded him in life. But Ackerley's pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self, making My Father and Myself a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book is a classic of twentieth-century memoir.
Customer Reviews:
alienated, sad, and gay in London between the wars.......2007-03-16
This is a beautifully written autobiography of a man breaking new literary ground. He openly wrote of his life as a gay man when it was ostensively illegal in GB, his search for love, and ultimately how he felt cut off from life. Each page aches with sadness, confusion, and need, never able to find what he wants from a human being, though he did late with his dog, Tulip, about which he wrote a classic book of love. There are quite unforgettable images thoughout the book, such as chance sexual encounters on a train ride with his mysterious father or the courtesies paid to him by his many lovers, such as a man with such bad smelling feet that he left his shoes on in bed. While there is a great deal of ironic humor in the book, its overall tone is one of loss, feeling lost in life and unloved in his many failed attempts to find a lasting partner. He also explores the mystery of his father, who hung out as a youth with a gay man he later knew as his landlord, and whom he never really knew or understood. It is a very moving book about an alien milieu and time, of a man hemmed in by inhibition and unfulfilled need.
A true classic - and important document........2006-01-06
This is one of the best books I've ever read. I've only just finished reading it for the second time. I'm still in shock and awe. Such a story. Such a candid and engaging chronicle of one man's life and also the life of his father.
Ackerley was a pioneer of "gay" literature. This is his masterpiece (without question). A more open and honest depiction of a gay man's sexual life (his likes and dislikes, his promiscuity, sexual incontinence, and his endless search for "the ideal friend")hadn't yet been written. Published the year after Ackerley's death, this book (and Crisp's "The Naked Civil Servant") clearly inspired a generation of gay writers.
Beautifully detailed, "My Father and Myself" is a unique memoir. I'd like to tell you all the details of the story, shocking and poignant. However, the pleasures this volume provides are in its revelations - to elaborate too much would spoil the fun. A soldier in WWI (and a prisoner of war), a lover of Ivor Novello, a private secretary to a Maharajah, a close friend of E. M. Forster - Ackerley's story is never dull or stodgy. "My Father and Myself" is a timeless treasure.
Not as good as I'd heard........2002-08-11
For years, I have heard about this book. After reading it, I am not that thrilled. I would suggest purchasing the JR Ackerly biography, as opposed to this. It's a bit sanitized for my taste.
Ackerley at his finest.......2002-05-16
The NYRB Classics series pretty much started out with a slew of reprints of the cult writer J.R. Ackerley, including his three memoirs (this, MY DOG TULIP and HINDOO HOLIDAY) and his one novel (WE THINK THE WORLD OF YOU). This, I would say, is easily his finest work. Ackerley's masterful reconstruction of his father's mysterious lovelife (comprising two unwed households and several unexplained longterm "friendships" with wealthy men) and his own conflicted sex life as a gay man in early twentieth-century London. Ackerley's tone always seems extremely honest, and while the narrative never comes to any absolute conclusions about Ackerley's father you're left convinced that these omissions and gaps are meaningful in and of themselves. This is as about a fine and interesting a memoir as I can imagine.
The Howling Fantods.......2001-03-06
Ackerley, a subtle and unassuming writer, has lately been quietly adopted as a "gay" writer. The term seems to have had less meaning in Ackerley's time than in ours. "My Father and Myself" would perhaps have been, at the time it was written, a suspenseful tale; it is constructed almost as a mystery. The modern reader, alert to every faint whiff of suggested homosexuality, will have guessed the memoir's (un-)shattering conclusion well before he has reached the end. No matter: Ackerley could've written elegantly and compellingly about stock-car racing, or peeling paint; his material here--his father's past and his own youth--is of universal interest, and of particular interest to unhappy sons.
Book Description
Breaking a lifelong silence, the last surviving child of Benito Mussolini opens the floodgates about his father.
In this historical, revisionist memoir, Romano Mussolini (September 26, 1927-February 3, 2006), the last surviving child of dictator Benito Mussolini, contributes his unique perspective to the growing body of work that portrays Il Duce's era. Through Romano's portrait of never before publicly shared memories and feelings, My Father Il Duce brings alive the domestic scenes of his childhood particularly when they intersected with his father's public role. He also relates in detail the memories of his mother, Donna Rachele, who lived until 1979 and often spoke with Romano about his father.
Romano's memories, sorted by chapter, but not presented chronologically, shift between his own recollections of time spent with his father to the years after Mussolini's death in 1945. The prose lingers and then artistically moves forward, melancholy to fierce to vulnerable, like the notes of the jazz music played by Romano during his acclaimed musical career.
Mussolini is presented here as a man who was supremely convinced that he was the master of his life: "'Everything happening around me,'" my father used to say, "'leaves me indifferent. I consciously choose 'Live dangerously' as my life's motto. As an old soldier, I say, 'If I advance, follow me. If I retreat, kill me. If they kill me, vindicate me.'" He saw his existence in scenes of high drama, envisioning in the end, Romano tells us, that he would be placed in front of throngs at New York City's Madison Square Garden and then executed in a macabre spectacle.
In this memoir, Romano does not truly ponder the consequences of his father's alliances and dictatorship, though with at least one notable exception that he gave considerable thought to his personal anger toward Hitler for "stabbing my father in the back at his darkest hour." Instead, he seeks to render concrete the memories that he held silent over a lifetime before they were lost to history.
The fascist order that Mussolini created and imposed upon Italy is one that Italians and students of history the world over are still interpreting. Indeed, his legacy was centerstage in the May 2006 Italian national elections, and one of the deputies in the Italian parliament today who represents his alliances is Alessandra Mussolini, Romano's daughter and defender of her infamous grandfather. As the trend of historical revisionism in Italy continues, in particular regarding the role of fascism, some of this kinder, gentler Mussolini is already widely accepted.
Thus, My Father Il Duce (in Italian Il Duce Mio Padre) was published to great attention and controversy in Italy in 2004 and quickly became a bestseller. Romano often appeared on Italian national television and in newspaper interviews. In part, this illuminates that fascist supporters are alive and well, while also confirms even among non-supporters, the ongoing attraction to the cult of personality Mussolini masterminded.
In Italy, this public discourse about Mussolini is common. However, for others it is important to establish a context for Romano's memoir. This is accomplished here through an accompanying masterful twenty-one page introductory essay by one of the world's foremost authorities on Italian political culture, Alexander Stille:
Writing the introductory essay to
My Father Il Duce is a bit like writing the warning label on a powerful drug that has its uses but must be taken with care and knowledge of its possible side effects.
Romano reached his goal of living to see the first publication of his memoir in Italian. As for this English-language edition, he earlier expressed approval of the front cover design. On January 1, 2006, he received the translated English language manuscript of his writing. During the last month of his life, he approved it. Romano Mussolini died on February 3, 2006, at age seventy-nine in a Rome hospital soon after heart surgery.
Romano's death made international news. The New York Times obituary reported: In the 1950's and 60's he was in the vanguard of Italian jazz with his group the Romano Mussolini All Stars, and he played with American greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Chet Baker. Mr. Mussolini gained even greater international fame with his first marriage, to Anna Maria Scicolone, the sister of the actress Sophia Loren....Despite his own scrupulous avoidance of politics, politicians from Italy's right wing-parties widely lauded Mr. Mussolini and his family name in statements they released: "Romano knew how to make us love him for his humanity, his art, but also for the dignity and coherence with which he defended his family from attacks and demonizations."
Through Romano's worldwide celebrity and well-regarded nature, his words in defense of Il Duce, albeit ones he no doubt wrote as a son who loved his father, offer a rare insider's perspective that can help us better understand, and therefore more readily defeat tyranny. This memoir's account of history further reminds us of the continuing need for our vigilance in the pursuit of truth. 18 historical photographs.
Customer Reviews:
My Father: Il Duce reveals the human and family side of a complex historical figure........2006-12-10
Written by Romano Mussolini, the son of infamous Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, My Father: Il Duce: A Memoir of Mussolini's Son contributes to history by shedding new light into aspects of the private life of "Il Duce". A riveting story of a state figure who went to great lengths to keep his private and public lives separate, who openly stated that he chose "Live dangerously" as his life's motto, and of a family that existed in continual danger of assassination, My Father: Il Duce reveals the human and family side of a complex historical figure. Highly recommended.
Il Duce, the Family Man .......2006-11-03
This unique short memoir, a best seller in Italy, is really about a son's blind and unconditional love for his father, even if this father had been a member of the grotesque family of 20th-century fascist monsters who ultimately were responsible for the slaughter of millions. In a penetrating introduction by the Italian political culture authority Alexander Stille, the fond recollections of Mussolini as an attentive and loving father who encouraged his son to pursue music, who always "performed" his family duty toward his wife, and who frequently entertained the kids with fabulous family stories, are put into perspective with citations of the cold historical facts. One has to read this brilliant introduction to really get those facts, as Romano Mussolini fails to deliver any of them. In fact, his recollections are about a more or less normal family life, if that can be said, and about the unfair treatment his father suffered at the hands of an ungrateful public who forgot all he did for them. The allies also aren't presented with any love or affection. There are anecdotes here that are worth reading as well, but in the end, one wonders how Romano could have steered clear of all the blood and gore, cruelty and absurd bravado that his father brought into the world. To me, this is more of a psychological study of one man's delusions and prejudices than a historical document. Nonetheless, it's provocative and well worth the quick read.
Book Description
My father told lies all his life and, because I knew no better, I repeated them. Lies about everything, great and small, were the very fabric of my world.
The lie in the title of this astonishing memoir is born of shame. Traveling around upstate New York in the nineties, John Burnside can’t bear to share the truth about his father during a casual conversation with a hitchhiker. He covers his uneasiness with a lie. It felt natural to do so.
His father, abandoned as a baby on a stranger’s doorstep, created a masterful web of deceit to erase this unbearable fact. John, even as a child, represented everything that was wrong with the world and became the recipient of his father’s selfhatred in the form of enraged violence, and worse, petty, cruel belittlement. Growing up in the tough working-class neighborhoods of Scotland and later England, John learned to lie back to his father and, later, about his father.
Average customer rating:
- Don't Give Up the Ship: Finding My Father While Lost at Sea
- A good read for good readers
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Don't Give Up the Ship: Finding My Father While Lost at Sea
Neil Steinberg
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
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The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances
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A Complete and Utter Failure
ASIN: 034543675X
Release Date: 2002-04-30 |
Book Description
For as long as he could remember, Neil Steinberg had heard his father Bob talk obsessively about his season at sea in the mid-1950s as radio operator aboard the Empire State, the gleaming training ship of the New York State Maritime College. The rocky crossing from New York harbor to Bermuda, and then on to Spain, Greece, and France; the run-ins with drunken shipmates; the shock of death at sea–Neil knew it all by heart. Now, forty-five years later, Bob and Neil, father and son, are set to embark on that same voyage together aboard the Empire State II.
And Neil is scared as hell. Scared of shipwreck, disaster at sea, terror, humiliation, and his father. But scared, above all, of the prospect of a month at sea with a man he has never understood.
In Don’t Give Up the Ship, Neil Steinberg has written a courageous, gripping, and honest memoir of an unforgettable voyage–and an unbelievably fraught relationship. This is not a hugs-and-high-fives tale scripted by Hollywood. In fact, these two men have never spent three days together without an explosion. But underneath the bitterness and disappointment, there has always been something deeper, a bond neither could ever talk about or name. To Neil, facing down the demons of middle age, this trip is his best chance, maybe his only chance, to find the father he never knew and be the son he was never able to be.
A dual memoir about their lives together and apart, Don’t Give Up the Ship helps Neil to finally understand what his dad went through nearly half a century ago as a handsome nineteen year old kid living in the Bronx of the 1940s, in flight from his own oppressive father, in search of adventure, determined to see the world, fall in love, and make something of himself.
Steinberg is too truthful a writer for the easy epiphany or the pat reconciliation. But at the end, after the landing in Naples and the quick overland trip through Italy, father and son do arrive at an understanding that changes both their lives. Don’t Give Up the Ship is not only a ripping good story of men and the sea, it is also a brave, frank, and unflinchingly real exploration of the nature of family love and the possibility of adventure.
Customer Reviews:
Don't Give Up the Ship: Finding My Father While Lost at Sea.......2002-05-17
Mr Steinberg wrote an interesting little true tale. I especially enjoyed two sections of the book. The first section being the look into his father's past. It was well placed in the middle of the book. Until that time the only view given was of the present. I enjoy seeing how a person changes from a brave, young man to a fear-driven, elderly man. The other part I enjoyed was the dialogue between father and son. It is interested to see how they relate to each other. Some of the book is a bit slow. I found the descriptions about the boat alittle too detailed. I know there will be people who absolutely love boats and they will disagree with me. Overall story is interesting and well written.
A good read for good readers.......2002-05-11
Neil Steinberg's "Don't Give Up the Ship" is a good read, but not an easy one. If you are looking for a book which revels in syrupy emotionalism and demands little from the reader, then this is not the book. But, if you want an open and honest accounting of of an emotional journey, then this is your book. As usual for Steinberg, the book uses clear language to make its points. This isn't one of those books where you aren't sure what the author was trying to say. What I valued in the book was how Steinberg reflected on his relationship with his Dad and came away knowing more not just about himself, but also about life in general. The story about Steinberg and his father retracing his Dad's journey to Europe on a ship is far more than a travelogue. It's a journey into better understanding the human condition. Well worth reading!
Average customer rating:
- Worth Reading
- A Must Read
- Just what this country needs.
- Growing up with Donnell Alexander
- Something different...
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Ghetto Celebrity: Searching for My Father in Me
Donnell Alexander
Manufacturer: Crown
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 1400046025
Release Date: 2003-06-10 |
Book Description
Donnell Alexander grew up sideways in the cramped spaces of Sandusky, Ohio, the son of a devout mother and a dad named Delbert, a protean genius who jacked a thousand identities—from pimpin’ them hoes to preaching the gospel—but skipped out on fatherhood when his son was in diapers. Donnell unwittingly replayed Delbert’s tragedy as farce until he finally wrote himself his own story, becoming a star of California’s freewheeling alternative press, spreading the gospels of punk and hip-hop in print. After finding a career and starting a family of his own, Donnell was drawn to reconnect with the vanished Delbert, and when he did, things fell apart, as they tend to in the grip of ghetto celebrity.
Told in multiple voices, freestyle raps, and a graphic interlude, this is the riotous story of one writer’s mission to find truth in the margins and an engrossing tale about phantom fathers and the sons they leave behind.
Customer Reviews:
Worth Reading.......2005-11-17
Take a good swing at Donnell Alexander. He deserves it sometimes for pretending to be the hippest dude on the block but the best kept secret is that there's a complexity here that goes beyond the sex, the dope, and the hip-hop pose. Sure he tried to screw up his life but somehow the gods allowed him to survive and become a writer worth something. At the end of the day he's still someone I'd want to have a beer with.
A Must Read.......2005-03-21
You've got to read this book. Not because it's all that good, but, as a black woman, we've (black men and women) got to find out what's wrong with SOME of our men. Donnell Alexander is the problem. Now, i'm not suggesting he be killed or even harmed, just examined. So buy his book and wonder... what happened.
Just what this country needs........2003-07-30
We are living in a time of lies. White lies, absurd lies, blatant lies, atrocious lies, I have had it with lies. The 80's look tame and "I am not a crook" Nixon is a altar boy in comparison. Donnell Alexander tells the truth with all of it's stankness. Donnell wrote about all of that we don't want to admit; our hatred of our bosses, our infidelities, our dysfuctional families, our drug use, our arrogance. It feels good to read honesty. This country needs hundreds more Ghetto Celebrities.
Growing up with Donnell Alexander.......2003-07-29
Whoa. This book is about much more than just Donnell Alexander.It's about a child of a unsupported single mother. An awkward adolescent boy trying to be cool (knowing he's not). A young writer trying to give himself the chance to succeed and really struggling with self discipline. And I empathised with all of him. I give the author MAJOR points for his frank descriptions of his sexual conquests. They felt true, lame, sorta selfish and very, very real. I love this uncovering of dimensions and histories of himself and those around him brave...not knowing or caring whether they look good to us or not. Maybe people will respond to the street-cred, hipness but I felt moved by the vulnerability underneath. I don't feel that often from any non-fiction I've read by a man of his age or background. If I had one complaint it's that the book jumps around a bit too much for my taste. I would've been happy to sink into any one of the stories going on for longer. I can't wait for this author's NEXT book.
Something different..........2003-07-29
If you love great writing, this is your book. I read a variety of authors, including Dostoevsky, Wallace Stegner, Maya Angelou, Anne Lamott, and Arundhati Roy. Ghetto Celebrity is a unique memoir that's about much more than a single life. Among other things, it's about growing up and about race in America. This is a very honest view, told with incredible style, pain and humor. One of the best books I've read in years.
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My Father's Son: A Memoir
Dimitri Drobatschewsky
Manufacturer: Bridgewood Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Jewish
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ASIN: 0927015277 |
Book Description
Souvenirs of a noted music critic, from life in Berlin before WW II to his experience in the French Foreign Legion. After settling in the U.S. he became - and was for 20 years - the music critic of The Arizona Republic.
Customer Reviews:
Sad, funny, poignant.......2003-11-18
A story of survival, of chance encounters, unbearable loss and suffering and yet of a spirit that survives and even flourishes, despite everything. Drobatschewsky writes about the loss of his father, but it is a loss of innocence, betrayal and the horrors of war brought on by the german people in WWII Germany. An interesting and riveting book that you won't be able to put down until it's finished. Dimitri's story is one that was shared by many in WWII Europe and he tells it in a way that will make you laugh and cry and wonder how he got through it.
Average customer rating:
- Disappointment
- A great writer
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In My Father's Garden (Deep South Books)
Lee May
Manufacturer: University Alabama Press
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Binding: Paperback
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Gardening Life
ASIN: 0817311580 |
Customer Reviews:
Disappointment.......2005-12-30
The author certainy had a good idea for the book, ie reconnecting with his estranged father through their common love of gardening, but his execution of the idea really missed the point. He instead chose to mostly write an autobiography in which he made that fatal error common to many autobiographists in assumming that his life minutiae was of the same interest to to others that it was to him. The result is a suprisingly bad book. Given the author's carreer as a journalist, it is really surprising that his book is so unfocused and of such little interest.
A great writer.......2000-08-14
Lee May is an excellent southern author. This is the story of reuniting with his estranged father and their mutual interest in gardening, but also is an account of the social changes during one man's life.
Book Description
My Father's Keeper is the moving story of Jonathan Silin, a gay man in midlife who learned to care for his elderly parents as a series of life-threatening illnesses forced them to make the difficult transition from being independent to being reliant on their son. Their new needs and unrelenting demands brought parents and child into intimate daily contact and radically transformed what had been a distant and emotionally fraught relationship.
My Father's Keeper chronicles the ways in which the ideas and skills Silin acquired as an early childhood educator, a specialist in life span development, and a compassionate witness to the devastation of the HIV/AIDS crisis came together with his interest in human psychology to deeply inform his thinking about the dramatic changes in his family's life and increasingly influence his role as his father's (and mother's) keeper.
"Jonathan Silin offers a series of valuable reports from what might be called the country of farewells, using his raw experience to explore important questions about childhood, education, parenting, privacy, control, mental health, old age, death, and forgiveness. This is a rich, careful, honest book, both nakedly personal and coolly philosophical. I've never read anything quite like it."
—Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters
Jonathan G. Silin, a member of the graduate faculty at Bank Street College of Education in New York, has published articles in Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, and Educational Theory, as well as in more popular periodicals such as Newsday, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Education Week. He is the author of Sex, Death, and the Education of Children, coeditor of Putting the Children First, and coproducer of Children Talk About AIDS.
Average customer rating:
- Wishing the Survivors Well
- A Tragic Legacy
- Hackneyed Theme
- The Perfect Cast to Find Father
- Fishing Below the Surface
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Wishing My Father Well: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Fly-Fishing
William Plummer
Manufacturer: Overlook TP
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1585672548 |
Book Description
A heartfelt memoir of three generations of fathers and sons who connect through their shared love of fly-fishing.
On the South Branch of the Raritan River in New Jersey, Bill Plummer casts his line in the hope that fly-fishing might fortify him in the face of a failed marriage, the death of his father, and a faltering career. Inspired by the discovery of his father's fly-fishing diary, Bill sets out to understand his father's curious allegiance to the sport and uses the diary as a point of access to what he thought was a distant and enigmatic man. As he comes to delight in the peculiar pleasures of his father's favorite pastime, he finds in it an approach to his son and the strength for a second marriage.
Wishing My Father Well is a moving intergenerational memoir in the spirit of James Prosek's Joe and Me and James Dodson's Faithful Travelers that passes down the wisdom of a silent father--an unprepossessing man who was "closer to nature than the rest of us"--and opens our eyes to fly-fishing's seductive power to unite people in a shared appreciation of the majesty and serenity of nature.
Customer Reviews:
Wishing the Survivors Well.......2003-12-05
This book was engaging & moving. I would not have read it save for the recommendation of a friend. You may be suprised at this delightful piece of work. I am very sorry to hear that Mr. Plummer and his adult son both died recently.
A Tragic Legacy.......2001-05-10
This is a lovely and very personal book. Bill Plummer writes with a passion and humor that is rarely found. His work serves at times as a painful mirror for his life while anticipating hope for the future.
About a year after this book reached the shelves, Bill's son Nicky died in his sleep. During May of this year (2001) Bill himself was struck by a severe heart attack that killed him.
The three men of "Wishing My Father Well" are with us now only on these pages. There is a great deal of life in this book. There is a great deal of Bill Plummer in these pages. Despite the losses that have occured, the book is warm, engaging, and humerous. I recommend that you invite Bill into your world through this work.
I miss Bill very much.
Hackneyed Theme.......2001-02-02
I read this book as a courtesy to my old flyfishing partner who gave it to me as a Christmas gift. I could tell from the summary on the dusk jacket that I would probably not like it very much . I was correct. I did not like it very much even though the setting was in my own home State of New Jersey on rivers that I have fished many times myself. I am so tired of flyfishing-as-therapy books. It is a hackneyed theme. Plummer's book is certainly not as bad as Harry Middleton's unreadable, flyfishing-as-therapy book "The Bright Country" but Plummer's book is also mercifully shorter. This book should sell as well as (or as poorly as) Plummer's "Buttercups and Strong Boys." To summarize my opinion of the book using Plummer's own words (see page 86), in writing the book, Plummer "was simply going where many others had been, redoing what had already been done many times before." If one wants to read an entertaining flyfishing-as-therapy book, try "Fly Fishing through the Midlife Crisis."
The Perfect Cast to Find Father.......2000-07-06
William Plummer's WISHING MY FATHER WELL hooked me immediately not because I fly fish (I don't) but because of what I might learn about searching for the truth about one's father. I was not disappointed. With a bent for heartfelt nuance, Plummer crisply leads the reader to a convincing, satisfying revelation in the book's finale, which in turn conveys good counsel for sons and fathers alike. An honest and wise book.
Fishing Below the Surface.......2000-07-01
"Wishing My Father Well" is a brave, lucid, taut and tender book. In it, William Plummer provides a moving and efficient lesson about how much life and drama lie beneath unexamined surfaces, of a father's fishing diary or of a stream. With a gentle, lyric and occasionally comic touch, he exposes his sometimes harsh, often poignant personal struggle - as father, son and fisherman- to overcome misguided impulses, heart-rending fumblings, isolation and depression. As with all well-told love stories, the reader will ache over Plummer's mistakes and suffer the suspense of his tale's outcome because its handsomely-braided strands (Will he learn to read a stream? To treat his son as a child? To comprehend his father's retreat from the world of go-getters and learn to appreciate his passion for fishing nymphs?) reflect upon each other even as they bear witness to fundamental human experiences that are puzzles to us all. I am grateful for the personal risk Plummer took in writing a book of such compressed beauty and for his intelligent introduction to the mystique of fly-fishing, for which I wish him well.
Books:
- Memories of Drop City: The first hippie commune of the 1960's and the Summer of Love
- My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding
- My Time: Making the Most of the Bonus Decades After 50
- Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow
- Night (Oprah's Book Club)
- Night (Oprah's Book Club)
- Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls
- One Last Time: A Psychic Medium Speaks to Those We Have Loved and Lost
- Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind The List
- Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind The List
Books Index
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