Revolution
by Deb Olin Unferth
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When novelist Deb Olin Unferth was 18, she fell in love with a college senior who apparently believed that “building a communist revolution was his Christian duty,” said Robert P. Baird in The New York Observer. Unferth’s voice can be “charming to a fault” as she revisits the couple’s late-’80s adventures in Central America as “clueless” would-be aides to a populist revolt. Yet her account is “impossible to dislike,” and the uniqueness of its love story sneaks up on you.
Henry’s Demons
by Patrick Cockburn and Henry Cockburn
(Scribner, $25)
Told jointly by a father and his son, Henry’s Demons offers a gripping account of “a young man’s voyage into madness,” said Nina Lakhani in the London Independent. Diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 20, Henry Cockburn describes his hallucinations so vividly “that you can almost taste the dangerous mixture of fear and elation” that fueled his riskiest behavior. His father’s struggle to understand is interesting, but not nearly as eye-opening.
Townie
by Andre Dubus III
(Norton, $26)
Violence was an everyday occurrence in the Massachusetts mill town where Andre Dubus III grew up, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. A world of “swaggering bullies” and weak authority figures, it taught the future novelist to argue with his fists before he learned to communicate through prose. But it’s striking how little bitterness he expresses about his own absentee dad. “Long before the end of Townie, it becomes evident that Dubus reached a maturity his father never quite attained.”
My Father’s Fortune
by Michael Frayn
(Metropolitan, $25)
British playwright Michael Frayn is far tougher on himself than on his father, said Katherine A. Powers in BarnesandNobleReview.com. Looking back at the asbestos salesman who was perennially “mystified and troubled” by the son who yearned to be a romantic poet, Frayn expresses “mortification at the callow youth he was.” But this affecting book is an appreciation of the treasures the old man left him anyway—“his smile, his skepticism, and the most fortunate gift of all, his very existence.”
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