How did my father influence who I am? Here are forty answers to this universal and searching question discovered by mining the recollections of sons and daughters from every imaginable background.
Brief essays about each father and memories of the child-parent relationship are accompanied by archival photographs.
Readers will follow these extraordinary people in the quest we all have to know more of the male parent who brought us into the world.
PRAISE FOR FORTY SONS AND DAUGHTERS
“As a writer, editor and teacher of memoir, I am stunned by the way this book, in snippets of merely 350 words, reveals the stories that matter most: the intimacies and struggles of family. Pay attention, literary world: The memoir has been reinvented.”
-Lary Bloom, author of The Writer Within, Letters From Nuremberg, 13 Days, and Lary Bloom’s Connecticut Notebook.
“Fathers, we all had them, love them or hate them or both. This is a lovely compendium of the man who shaped each of us that may well teach some valuable lessons in life.”
-Morley Safer, CBS News Correspondent and 60 Minutes cast member. Author of Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam.
“Far more than forty fathers, this book offers an infinity of portraits! On each reading the fathers and their children change shape. The lens seems always to be at a fresh angle, differently illuminating the two joined figures struggling to separate in the shifting mansions of memory. This is a profound and luminous source of enrichment in our journeys to understand ourselves.”
-David Hays, with his son Daniel, co-authored My Old Man and the Sea, the ultimate father-son adventure through the world’s most fabled waters in a little boat named The Sparrow.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jess Maghan, author and editor, recently retired as professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He continues to advise governments and police departments around the world on illicit trafficking, hate crimes and terrorism.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER:
Sam Lindberg, photographer, has had a long career as a professional photographer and has collaborated with Irving Penn and other distinguished artists.
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