My father's war : a memoir / by Paul West.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

West, Paul, 1930-2015.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

West, Alfred Massick.

Soldiers--Great Britain--Biography.

Soldiers.

Fathers and sons.

Great Britain.

World War, 1914-1918--Campaigns--Western Front.

World War, 1914-1918.

Fathers and sons--Great Britain.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

187 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Kingston, N.Y. : McPherson, [2005]

Summary:

The appearance of Paul West's memoir of his mother, My Mother's Music, led a legion of readers to anticipate a companion volume about his father. Paul West now obliges not only with an enthraling remembrance of the blinded, shell-shocked survivor of three years of trench warfare during "The War to End All Wars"-but also with an exploration of the legacy the warrior-father imparts to his willing yet unsuspecting son. The time recounted is 1939 to 1945, when ten-year-old Paul grows into prime adolescence. Together, father and son play war games, guarding the English coast from foxholes under the kitchen table, or watching on moonlit nights as real Nazi bombers pass overhead. All the while, Alfred Massick West instructs young Paul in his agonies and glories of twenty years before. The two have much in common, though distantly, and Paul slowly learns to understand and even second-guess his father, although the compulsions that grip the war veteran largely remain a mystery separating their generations-a conundrum of what the son wishes his still-damaged father could be, bound up with expectations no father can ever quite live up to. In this memoir Paul West retraces the lineaments of his youth, and leads us in twenty-five chiseled chapters on an odyssey of two lives which calculates the distance between those who survive war's devastation, and those who must bear its consequence.

Contents:

1 My Father Weightless 11

2 Hands 20

3 The Legion of Honor 23

4 Gloves 34

5 A Boy's Blitz 38

6 Chivalry 48

7 A Dissertation upon Greased Pig 51

8 Penates 60

9 The Sea Coast of Bohemia 63

10 Da-Di 72

11 Bomber's Moon 75

12 Ball 87

13 The Light Militia of the Lower Air 91

14 Trousers-Press 100

15 Bluebells 103

16 Brass 116

17 Something about a Soldier 119

18 Chevrons 130

19 An Extraordinary Mildness 134

20 Esq. 144

21 Eyeless at Gaza 148

22 Plenty 158

23 Immersed in the Nodens 162

24 Song of Norway 171

25 The Oozy Weeds about Me Twist 180.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0929701755

OCLC:

58546789