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.

Born into a leading Lithuanian-Jewish rabbinic family, Moshe Aron Reguer initially followed the path of traditional yeshiva education. His adolescence coincided with World War I and its upheavals, pandemics, and pogroms, as well as with new ideas of Haskala, Zionism, and socialism. His memoir, recently discovered and here translated and published for the first time, discusses his internal struggles and describes the world around him and the people who influenced him. Moshe Aron Reguer wrote his memoir at the age of 23, on the eve of his departure for Eretz Israel in 1926. However, his story did not end there, but continued in British Mandated Palestine and the United States. He kept in touch with the family in Brest-Litovsk until the Nazis destroyed Jewish Lithuania, and some of their correspondence is included within this volume.

My Father's Journey is about one man's poignant journey from idyllic childhood in Aurora, New York, to World War II pilot in England to prisoner of war in a desolate camp in German-occupied Poland. Experience firsthand Baldwin C. Avery's struggle to survive the 20th century and all it brought-triumphs and tragedies, love and loss, and a legacy of service to country and community-with the power of faith and family at the heart of it all. In this full color version, My Father's Journey unfolds as a daughter delves into her father's collection of letters, journals, newspaper clippings, photos, and memoirs, and pieces them together to re-create his amazing and inspiring story.

Born into a poor West African family in the disease-stricken town of Fontem, John N. Atabong embarked into the unknown in search of hope. He was eleven, but he triumphed against all odds to give his children the best care and education available. Eventually, he sacrificed his most valuable possession, his son Sixtus, sending him to study in the United States with nothing more than lessons learned from his days working the farms and his father's basic biblical teachings. Sixtus Atabong's journey of temptations and challenges in the US gives rise to a mission: to give back. He uses his gift to extend God's healing hands and unfailing love to the far corners of the earth through sustainable health care infrastructures. Fulfilling his father's dream, Sixtus hopes that he too can leave the world a better place than he found it.

The other two, Guadalcanal and Peleliu, are legendary.

As a child growing up in the Hollywood Hills during the 1950s, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson thought it was perfectly normal that a guru named Paul Brunton lived with his family and dictated everything about their daily rituals, from their diet to their travel plans to his parents' sex life. But in this extraordinary memoir, Masson reflects on just how bizarre everything about his childhood was-especially the relationship between his father and the elusive, eminent mystic he revered (and supported) for years. Writing with candor and charm, Masson describes how his father became convinced that Paul Brunton-P.B. to his familiars-was a living God who would fill his life with enlightenment and wonder. As the Masson family's personal guru, Brunton freely discussed his life on other planets, laid down strict rules on fasting and meditation, and warned them all of the imminence of World War III. For years, young Jeffrey was as ardent a disciple as his father-but with the onset of adolescence, he staged a dramatic revolt against this domestic deity and everything he stood for. Filled with absurdist humor and intimate confessions, My Father's Guru is the spellbinding coming-of-age story of one of our most brilliant writers. REVIEWS "An uncompromising yet compassionate book . . . A coming-of-age memoir unlike any other." -The Toronto Star "AN EXTRAORDINARY CAUTIONARY TALE .... about the enduring human impulse to imbue charismatic individuals with superhuman attributes." -San Francisco Chronicle "Told with a mixture of humor and compassion. . . . Throughout this confessional book a grown man tells of an unusual, even weird childhood and the blind submission that consumed his family's life." -ROBERT COLES The New York Times Book Review "My Father's Guru is an interesting account of a warped upbringing made fascinating by the insight it provides into Masson's adult life. He makes no excuses: in initially revering Freud and other authority figures, Masson realizes he was seeking new and better gurus that Brunton-and was fated to reject them pitilessly when they showed themselves, like Brunton, to be merely human." -Los Angeles Times Book Review "Beneath the guru-bashing, the book is Masson's poignant and loving indictment of his parents, worth reading for his psychological portrait of coming-of-age disillusionment." -Seattle Weekly

A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic. Winner of the National Book Award, 1976 World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century. This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.