Arts & Photography
Audio CDs
Audiocassettes
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical
Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
|
 |
The Last Marlin: The Story of a Family at Sea |
List Price: $23.95
Your Price: $23.95 |
 |
|
|
|
| Product Info |
Reviews |
Description:
His father, Abe, was a superb salesman who parlayed personal charm and client loyalty into success despite a series of debilitating ailments. His mother, Stella, was a painter who numbered among her friends Jackson Pollock and Louise Nevelson; she despised the affluent lifestyle her husband cultivated and viewed his taking a job with her father's lighting-fixture company as a betrayal. Before and after their divorce, writes Fred Waitzkin, "Mother and Dad warred within me." His unsparing memoir depicts a larger war within the family waged by grandparents, aunts and uncles, and his own brother, who fled from their parents' troubles into a bohemian, self-destructive life. Young Fred embraced orthodox Judaism and "cultivated [his] conventional side" to emulate Abe, yet he also dreamed of being a writer. Through it all, fishing--beloved by Abe, despised by Stella--remained his escape and his comfort. Waitzkin, who proved with Searching for Bobby Fischer that he could use the particulars of an avocation to illuminate the emotional needs it assuaged, does the same here with wonderfully evocative details about fishing. A closing scene chronicling a 1998 hunt for tuna with his wife and two children tentatively suggests that this generation of Waitzkins has found some measure of the happiness that eluded Abe and Stella. --Wendy Smith
|
|
|
|
