Father and son : a memoir

Title:

Author:

Summary:

In June 2011, just days before his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban was sitting down to dinner with his daughter when he found he couldn’t move his knife to his plate. Later that night, at the hospital, doctors confirmed what all had suspected: that he had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke, paralyzing the right side of his body. Once he became stable, Raban embarked on an extended stay at a rehabilitation center, where he became acquainted with, and struggled to accept, the limitations of his new body—learning again how to walk and climb stairs, attempting to bathe and dress himself, and rethinking how to write and even read. Woven into these pages is an account of a second battle, one that his own father faced in the trenches during World War II. With intimate letters that his parents exchanged at the time, Raban places the budding love of two young people within the tumultuous landscape of the war’s various fronts, from the munition-strewn beaches of Dunkirk to blood-soaked streets of Anzio. Moving between narratives, his and theirs, Raban artfully explores the human capacity to adapt to trauma, as well as the warmth, strength, and humor that persist despite it. The result is Father and Son, a powerful story of mourning, but also one of resilience. -- Amazon.

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

323 pages ; 25 cm

Genre:

Autobiographies.

Biographies.

Personal Subject:

Raban, Jonathan-Health.

Raban, Jonathan-Family.

Raban, Peter, 1918-1996.

Subject Term:

Cerebrovascular disease -- Patients -- Biography.

Fathers and sons -- Biography.

Geographic Term:

Seattle (Wash.) -- Biography.

Publisher:

Alfred A. Knopf,

Publication Date:

2023

ISBN:

9780375422454

Publication Information:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

Call Number:

928 RABAN

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003676759	New Adult Nonfiction	928 RABAN	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * A poignant memoir of love, trauma, and recovery after a life-changing stroke, twinned to a powerful account of his father's experience in World War II, by a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

"A beautiful, compelling memoir...Raban's final work is a gorgeous achievement." --Ian McEwan, New York Times best-selling author of Lessons

In June 2011, just days before his sixty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Raban was sitting down to dinner with his daughter when he found he couldn't move his knife to his plate. Later that night, at the hospital, doctors confirmed what all had suspected: that he had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke, paralyzing the right side of his body. Once he became stable, Raban embarked on an extended stay at a rehabilitation center, where he became acquainted with, and struggled to accept, the limitations of his new body--learning again how to walk and climb stairs, attempting to bathe and dress himself, and rethinking how to write and even read.

Woven into these pages is an account of a second battle, one that his own father faced in the trenches during World War II. With intimate letters that his parents exchanged at the time, Raban places the budding love of two young people within the tumultuous landscape of the war's various fronts, from the munition-strewn beaches of Dunkirk to blood-soaked streets of Anzio. Moving between narratives, his and theirs, Raban artfully explores the human capacity to adapt to trauma, as well as the warmth, strength, and humor that persist despite it. The result is Father and Son, a powerful story of mourning, but also one of resilience.

Author Notes

Jonathan Raban was an award-winning travel writer, novelist, and critic. He was born in, Norfolk, England on June 14, 1942. He studied English at the University of Hull. He went on to lecture at Aberystwyth University. Then he taught in the creative writing department at the University of East Anglia.

His early writing was done while on vacation. He wrote fiction and journalism. In 1969, he moved to London and became a freelance writer and journalist, writing book reviews and literary criticism. He felt inspired by his friend, Robert Lowell. Who turned some of his own life experiences into art.

Raban's travel books included Arabia: Through the Looking Glass (1979); Old Glory (1981); Coasting (1986); Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1991); Bad Land: An American Romance (1996); Passage to Juneau (1999); and Driving Home: An American Journey (2011). He wrote three novels, Foreign Land (1985), Waxwings (2003), and Surveillance (2006).

He won many awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and others.

Jonathan Raban died on January 17, 2023, in Seattle, Washington, of complications from a stroke, which he had in 2011. He was 80.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (1)

Publisher's Weekly Review

This exceptional posthumous memoir from National Book Critics Circle Award winner Raban (Bad Land, 1942--2023) runs on two equally rewarding tracks. The first involves Raban's six-week stay at a rehabilitation facility following his sudden stroke in 2011; the second concerns his father's WWII correspondences with Raban's mother while he was at war in Italy and France and she remained in England. In the book's early sections, Raban delves into his parents' back-and-forth as he navigates endless days in the hospital, soothed by their fortitude in the face of even greater adversity. Drawing on the work of various historians, he places their letters in the war's chronological context, and finds himself growing emotionally closer to his father, with whom he barely had a relationship until he was in his 40s. Before long, a second father figure comes into focus: Tony Judt, whose 2006 book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 Raban reads "as a self-imposed course on intellectual rehabilitation... and a history of my (and my father's) lifetime on my own subcontinent," and whose Memory Chalet (in which Judt discusses his ALS-induced quadriplegia) Raban calls "one of the most engaging memoirs that I have ever read." Like Judt before him, Raban catalogs "the catastrophic progress of one's own deterioration" with warmth and intellectual rigor, effortlessly weaving together personal history and literary critique. Tirelessly researched and told with remarkable candor, this often breathtaking memoir is a worthy successor to Raban's hero's. (Sept.)