In this bittersweet and beautifully written memoir Carolyn See embarks on nothing less than a reevaluation of the American Dream. "This is a history," she writes, "of how drugs and drink have worked in our family for the last fifty - actually it turned out to be closer to a hundred - years. In varying degrees, it's history seen through a purple haze. It's full of secrets and chaos and distortions, and secretly remembered joys. I'm beginning to think it may be the unwritten history of America.". Although it features a clan in which dysfunction was something of a family tradition, Dreaming is no "victim's story" or temperance tract. With a wry humor and not a trace of self-pity, See writes of fights and breakups and hard times, but also of celebration and optimism in the face of adversity. The story of See's own family speaks for the countless people who reached for the shining American vision, found it eluded their grasp, and then tried to make what they had glitter as best they could. Dreaming is about yearning, imagining, and reinventing oneself, about rolling with the punches and continuing on. In this fiercely funny and deeply empathetic book, See shows us that the wild life, for better and worse, has made us what we are.
"Robert Flynn has gathered an eclectic array of seventeen essays, all of which will evoke a direct and immediate response. Ranging from humorous to satirical, from persuasive to sarcastic, Flynn moves from preaching to the choir to preaching at the choir. Trained as both a Baptist and a Marine, he explores the concepts gleaned from a world that this training did not equip him to control, improve, or escape. Flynn admits he has tried to meld the pretty presumption of the Baptists that "all men are brothers" with the hard presumption of the Marines that "you will attack until I say you are dead." He calls the result an unholy view of the world in which he lives and survives, alternating between humor and anger."--BOOK JACKET.
"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." "Sue Miller now gives us a 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."--BOOK JACKET.
At 36, Kelly had a good marriage, a couple of kids, and a weekly newspaper column. But she still saw herself as George Corrigan's daughter. A garrulous Irish-American charmer from Baltimore, George was the center of the ebullient, raucous Corrigan clan. Kelly's was a colorful childhood, just the sort a girl could get attached to. She lives deep within what she calls the Middle Place--"that sliver of time when parenthood and childhood overlap"--but she's abruptly shoved into a coming-of-age when she finds a lump in her breast. And so her journey to full-blown adulthood begins. When George, too, learns he has late-stage cancer, it is Kelly's turn to take care of the man who had always taken care of her--and show us a woman as she finally takes the leap and grows up.--From publisher description.
Walt Coburn's father pioneered in Montana Territory, joined the Vigilantes who chased road agents, and eventually built up one of the biggest cow outfits in the young state. The Circle C Ranch spread over thirty thousand acres in northern Montana, near the town of Malta. Walt is rather small for age fourteen - only "stirrup high" to his pony Snowflake - when he works on the Circle C and learns a lot from the tough cowboys, and from his own scrapes and falls. His summer vacation from school increases in excitement when Kid Curry and other members of the Wild Bunch loom on the horizon. Stirrup High conveys all the know-how and atmosphere of roughing it on a ranch in 1903.
