An American Requiem
God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us
James Carroll
- 296 pages
- English
- ePUB (adapté aux mobiles)
- Disponible sur iOS et Android
An American Requiem
God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us
James Carroll
Ă propos de ce livre
National Book Award winner: This story of a family torn apart by the Vietnam era is "a magnificent portrayal of two noble men who broke each other's hearts" ( Booklist ). James Carroll grew up in a Catholic family that seemed blessed. His father, who had once dreamed of becoming a priest, instead began a career in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, rising through the ranks and eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, the founder of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Young Jim lived a privileged life, dating the daughter of a vice president and meeting the popeâall in the shadow of nuclear war, waiting for the red telephone to ring in his parents' house. James fulfilled the goal his father had abandoned, becoming a priest himself. His feelings toward his father leaned toward worship as wellâuntil the tumult of the 1960s came between them. Their disagreements, over Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement; turmoil in the Church; and finally, Vietnamâwhere the elder Carroll chose targets for US bombsâbegan to outweigh the bond between them. While one of James's brothers fled to Canada, another was in law enforcement ferreting out draft dodgers. James, meanwhile, served as a chaplain at Boston University, protesting the war in the streets but ducking news cameras to avoid discovery. Their relationship would never be the same again. Only after Carroll left the priesthood to become a writer, and a husband with children of his own, did he begin to understand fully the struggles his father had faced. In An American Requiem, the New York Times bestselling author of Constantine's Sword and Christ Actually offers a benediction, in "a moving memoir of the effect of the Vietnam War on his family that is at once personal and the story of a generation... at once heartbreaking and heroic, this is autobiography at its best" ( Publishers Weekly ).