A memoir by the bestselling author of The Prince of Tides about his father, the inspiration for The Great Santini, and a reaffirmation that love can conquer even the meanest of men.

Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family's back door one morning with the tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael's father, had been found dead near his car on Chicago's North Side of an apparent heart attack. Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright and shining star in the competitive, hard-living world of newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled...

"A poignant memoir of recovery and reflection after a life-changing stroke, by a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award"-- 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 he had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke, paralyzing the right side of his body. Once he became...

"A memoir of motorcycles and muscles, of obsession and grief, and of a young man who learned how to stay alive through literature. At just forty-seven years old, William Giraldi's father was killed in a horrific motorcycle crash while racing on a country road. This tragedy, which forever altered the young Giraldi and devastated his family, provides the pulse for The Hero's Body. In the tradition of Andre Dubus III's Townie, this is a deep-seeing investigation...

The news anchor of NBC News' Today tells the story of the father figures in his life as well as his reconciliation and understanding of his own father, and how all these experiences and encounters have informed his understanding of his own role as a dad. Growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, Melvin had a fraught relationship with his father. Lawrence Melvin was a distant, often absent parent due to his drinking as well as his job working the graveyard...

The extraordinary debut from documentarian Bing Liu weaves a story of skateboarding, friendship, and fathers and sons into a coming-of-age journey of courageous vulnerability.