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Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow
Bottom of the pile
16
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
15/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Deborah Tannen
Publisher:
Ballantine Books
Date:
September 15, 2020
Before she was a bestselling author, Deborah Tannen was a girl who adored her father. Though he was often absent during her childhood, she was influenced by his gift for writing and storytelling. 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.
What The Reviewers Say
In the first four words of her debut memoir, Deborah Tannen makes the message of her book perfectly clear.
Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, is an expert on how we use words to both reveal and hide ourselves from the people who mean the most to us.
... [Tannen] displays an acute ability to decode and explain the hidden messages and assumptions our words unwittingly convey, whether about power, status, a wish for greater connection or its opposite.
Chapters on Eli's childhood in the Hasidic Jewish section of Warsaw in the early 1900s are as fascinating as the impressive recollections of his aunts and uncles.
