My Father Left Me Ireland

My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son's Search for Home by Michael Brendan Dougherty, 217 pages

It's a cliche - the American travelling to Ireland to visit a "homeland" his family left generations ago.  For Michael Brendan Dougherty, however, Ireland is closer than that, for not only was his mother of Irish descent, his father was from Dublin, and after siring his son he returned and started a permanent family there.  Back in America, Dougherty's mother nurtured her son with Irish culture, even taking the trouble to learn Gaelic.  It's another cliche - the outsider who had to fight for his inheritance and therefore values it more highly than those who received it as an undoubted birthright.  Yet Dougherty's story of coming to terms with his father's absence - and even more important, his invisible presence - is so compellingly personal that cynicism surrenders.  

My Father Left Me Ireland takes the form of a series of open letters from Dougherty to his father, centering both on their personal history and on the history of the Easter Rising.  Through this lens, the author explores what he characterizes as "an age of disinheritance", revealing the illusions of those "realists" who imagine fatherhood to be a biological accident and nationhood a geographical accident.  What is really Real, he discovers, is built on and through sacrifice.

Duty: A Father, his son and the man who won the war

Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War by Bob Greene              Hardcover: 296 pgs.

     The dropping of the atomic bomb is a very interesting part of history to me, so this book was a thrill to read, as it’s largely about Col. Paul Tibbets, the man who piloted the plane that bombed Hiroshima.  Greene, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and Life magazine, narrates how he met, interviewed and ultimately became good friends with the aging World War II pilot (who has now passed away).  The author is obviously very curious about “the man who won the war” and asks many insightful questions; Tibbets responds with some very interesting answers about the war and his general outlook on life.  What’s especially interesting, of course, is reading what Tibbets thought of his bombing of Hiroshima.

     Tibbets’ perspective alone would make for an engaging book, but the author adds a second layer.  A very skillful writer, Greene weaves in the story of his father’s attitude on life and experience in World War II with that of Col. Tibbets.  The result is a compelling portrait of the opinions and outlook of the World War II Generation.  The book title, Duty, is a great one-word summary of that generation’s emphasis and perspective.

     This is a very well-written book and will help readers of younger generations better understand and appreciate their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents.  Greene’s wonderfully-crafted book gets 5 out of 5 stars in my book.   ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐   

 - John W.

The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy     241 pages

From Goodreads:

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

My Review:

This book is not for me. It's a post-apocalyptic/dystopian world built around two characters, a father and son, as they make their way through the ruins of America looking for...I don't really know what. They don't know what. It's cold, it's desolate, it's nearly hopeless, and ultimately not a lot happens.

I'm sure that many people have found some sort of deep meaning in all this, but to me it was the same situation played out over and over again: traveling, running out of food, almost dying of starvation, finding a magical store of previously unfound food, rinse and repeat. Sure the father and son discussed the morals of good and bad, McCarthy explores the idea of what mankind will become if left to their own devices, but it was done in such a boring way!

I probably would have put this book down after the first few pages, but I am counting this book as my "Oprah Winfrey Book Club Book," for Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge, so I had to get through it. And I did. I just didn't enjoy it. Read it if you're into slow-paced, thought-driven prose and bleak dystopian landscapes

The Barrowfields

  

The Barrowfields by Phillip Lewis 368 pages

I was attracted to Lewis’ debut novel for two reasons. First, I read that someone thought this is the kind of novel “you’d get if you crossed Shirley Jackson and Pat Conroy; a southern Gothic haunted house tale with a coming of age story.” Jackson, Conroy, Southern, Gothic, haunted house. I admit it, there wasn’t much that could stop me from reading this one.

I had, wrongly, assumed, that Barrowfields was either a) the family name, b) the name of the house, or c) the name of a town. Actually, Barrowfields is a barren wasteland in North Carolina. I “think” it’s near the coast, but I can’t remember right now.

The story centers around the Aster family. They are typical Appalachian folk: poor, hard-working, honest. Helton and Madeline do their best. Their “children were well cared for even if food and clothes were hard to come by.”

The couple has one son, Henry. He is different than other kids; he loves to read (another reason I was drawn to this story). He leaves the mountains, desperate to make it as writer, but gets a law degree, for college, but ultimately returns with a pregnant wife in tow. They settle down to make a life, purchasing a gothic house high on the hill.  

They have a son, Henry, Jr., who narrates the novel. They settle into life. And that’s the problem with this novel. While the writing is beautiful, the plot just moseys along, It’s like reading about a bunch of people sitting around thinking. I think it’s the long sentences and the slow pace that made this such a chore. I wasn’t pulled into the story; I couldn’t find an arc that really enticed me to read. 

Little to no plot in a beautifully written novel are the reasons that  The Barrowfields receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for this review.

Mosquito Coast

The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux, 374 pages

It is the early '80s, and America is falling apart, drowning in the garbage of its consumerist excess, splitting apart along racial and class lines, sweating in terror of an implacable enemy.  Allie Fox sees this, even if no one else does, and transplants his family from rural Massachusetts to the Honduran jungle, seeking a fresh start and a better way.  Brilliant and fiercely determined, nothing will stop Allie from building his version of heaven or hell.

Teenaged Charlie Fox suffers being the focus of his father's attempts to force human nature to conform to his will.  As the narrator, he shares with us his struggle to find sanity in a world ruled by madness.

An uncomfortable, haunting tale.

Hunger of the Wolf

The Hunger of the Wolf by Stephen Marche
 253  Pages

"The body in the snow belonged to Ben Wylie, the heir to America's second-wealthiest business dynasty, and it is found in a remote patch of northern Canada. Far away, in post-crash New York, Jamie Cabot, the son of the Wylie family's housekeepers, must figure out how and why Ben died. He knows the answer lies in the tortured history of the Wylie family, who over three generations built up their massive holdings into several billion dollars' worth of real estate, oil, and information systems despite a terrible family secret they must keep from the world."

 It is as if Marche couldn't decide what type of book to write.  Historical fiction? Supernatural? Morality Tale?  This indecision results in a book that fails to deliver a coherent message or to entertain. 

The Country of Marriage

The Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry, 53 pages

 

This short collection of poems has the usual Wendell Berry hallmarks - sense of place, reverence for man and nature, concern for the connections between people and places and sadness at their disappearance.  The quality of the poems is uneven, but there are a few genuine gems, especially "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" and "The Gathering".  None of the poems seem labored or overstay their welcome.

 

At turns wise, moving, and occasionally even beautiful, Berry's poetry is definitely worth reading.

The Desert of Love

The Desert of Love by Francois Mauriac, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 163 pages

Mauriac, the winner of the Nobel prize for Literature in 1952, is perhaps best known for his novel Vipers' Tangle (aka Knot of Vipers).  This novel, like that one, is about an unhappy bourgeois French family in the early twentieth century.  Paul Courreges is a successful doctor whose passion for one of his patients leads him to the brink of abandoning his family and fortune.  His son, Raymond, becomes deeply infatuated with a woman he happens to meet on a train.  The object of their desires is, in fact, the same woman, Maria Cross, although the versions of her they cherish in their respective imaginations are quite different.  Their relationships with Maria come to have a life-defining impact on both of them.

There is very little action in this book.  It is primarily a psychological, moral, and therefore finally spiritual tale, much like the work of Leon Bloy.  Throughout, Mauriac shows himself a master at depicting how seemingly inconsequential actions, once internalized, can become distorted and magnified, growing in the heart like a snake twisting inside an egg.  He is not likely to please readers uncomfortable with subtlety and ambiguity.

The True Tale of The Monster Billy Dean telt by hisself

The True Tale of The Monster Billy Dean telt by hisself by David Almond 256 Pages

This is the story of Billy Dean, as he says, telt by hisself.  Billy was born the day the bombs fell and was kept secret from what remained of the world.  The only people Billy has ever seen is his mother and father.  His father doesn’t live with them, but shows up some nights, telling Billy stories about God and the stars.  One day, his father stops coming and his mother takes him out to see the rest of the world.  With a few friends, Billy tries to make sense of the broken world the bombs left, and to begin to piece together the story of his birth.  Because people believe that he is the Aynjel Child that can save them all. 

I didn’t like the book very much.  I found the phonetic spelling of words that Billy uses to be distracting.  It makes sense that Billy, being mostly uneducated, would spell this way, but it made the book really hard to read.  I wouldn’t personally recommend this book, although I have liked a lot of the books this author has written.