Shortly before his father's death, Lennard Davis received a cryptic call from his uncle Abie, who said he had a secret he wanted to tell him one day. When finally revealed, the secret--that Abie himself was Davis's father, via donor insemination--seemed too preposterous to be true. Born before the wide use of such technologies, Davis was filled with doubt about the truth of what this ne'er-do-well uncle was claiming. Moreover, Abie was mentally unstable, an unreliable witness to the past. For over twenty years, Davis tried to erase the whole episode from his mind.Then he decided to approach Ira Glass of This American Life so that he and the show could dig deeper into this mystery. Davis's obsession to find the truth led him to DNA labs and online genealogical research sites.A suspenseful and absorbing personal journey, this is also a fascinating intellectual foray into the history of artificial insemination and a moving investigation of all our attempts to understand ourselves. The book is an expansion of the This American Life show also titled "Go Ask Your Father."

I had ample opportunity to ask Dad these questions when he was alive, But it seemed that a million reasons not to do so could always be found. It was a waste of everything Dad had ever seen, done, and thought about not to hear his answers, and I regret not finding out more about him when I had the chance. Questions for My Father was borne of that regret and has one underlying objective: to develop a blueprint for discovery so that children of any age can start to build a clearer, deeper picture of the man behind the word . -- Vincent Staniforth

“Like the YouTube channel, this is a touching yet informative guide for those seeking fatherly advice, or even a few good dad jokes.” — Library Journal

Collected from her highly successful column in the Times - in which she seeks expert opinion to back up her own experience, Ask your Father provides succinct, on-the-button advice to every question from a child you could possibly have the misfortune to be faced with. This will make you laugh all the way to the school gates.

A #1 New York Times bestselling author traces her father’s life from turn-of-the-century Warsaw to New York City in an intimate memoir about family, memory, and the stories we tell. “An accomplished, clear-eyed, and affecting memoir about a man who is at once ordinary and extraordinary.”—Forward Long before she was the acclaimed author of a groundbreaking book about women and men, praised by Oliver Sacks for having “a novelist’s ear for the way people speak,” Deborah Tannen was a girl who adored her father. Though he was often absent during her childhood, she was profoundly influenced by his gift for writing and storytelling. As she grew up and he grew older, she spent countless hours recording conversations with her father for the account of his life she had promised him she’d write. But when he hands Tannen journals he kept in his youth, and she discovers letters he saved from a woman he might have married instead of her mother, she is forced to rethink her assumptions about her father’s life and her parents’ marriage. In this memoir, Tannen embarks on the poignant, yet perilous, quest to piece together the puzzle of her father’s life. Beginning with his astonishingly vivid memories of the Hasidic community in Warsaw, where he was born in 1908, she traces his journey: from arriving in New York City in 1920 to quitting high school at fourteen to support his mother and sister, through a vast array of jobs, including prison guard and gun-toting alcohol tax inspector, to eventually establishing the largest workers’ compensation law practice in New York and running for Congress. As Tannen comes to better understand her father’s—and her own—relationship to Judaism, she uncovers aspects of his life she would never have imagined. Finding My Father is a memoir of Eli Tannen’s life and the ways in which it reflects the near century that he lived. Even more than that, it’s an unflinching account of a daughter’s struggle to see her father clearly, to know him more deeply, and to find a more truthful story about her family and herself.

Morrisons memoir of the life and death of his father was one of the best-reviewed books of 1995, and promises to be an enduring classic of family literature--a work that explores the deepest emotions of being a father and a son.

Getting home after a long day's work to find your house flying off - now there's an upsetting situation. What can you do? Who should you ask for help? As we all know, buildings don't come with an instruction manual, but even if they did, would anyone think to include a chapter on airborne houses? This story is about that rare phenomenon: a house that takes a notion to take off. There isn't an easy solution to such an unusual event, and the owner of this house doesn't know what to do. Where do you start when your house flies away? The fire department? The police? The civil aviation department? Not easy at all. Still, every cloud has a silver lining, as this owner discovers when his house comes back down to earth.