Dad's Maybe Book Lib/E

Product Description

Best-selling author Tim O’Brien shares wisdom from a life in letters, lessons learned in wartime, and the challenges, humor, and rewards of raising two sons.


“We are all writing our maybe books full of maybe tomorrows, and each maybe tomorrow brings another maybe tomorrow, and then another, until the last line of the last page receives its period.”   In 2003, already an older father, National Book Award–winning novelist Tim O’Brien resolved to give his young sons what he wished his own father had given to him—a few scraps of paper signed “Love, Dad.” Maybe a word of advice. Maybe a sentence or two about some long-ago Christmas Eve. Maybe some scattered glimpses of their rapidly aging father, a man they might never really know. For the next fifteen years, the author talked to his sons on paper, as if they were adults, imagining what they might want to hear from a father who was no longer among the living.   O’Brien traverses the great variety of human experience and emotion, moving from soccer games to warfare to risqué lullabies, from alcoholism to magic shows to history lessons to bittersweet bedtime stories, but always returning to a father’s soul-saving love for his sons.   The result is Dad’s Maybe Book, a funny, tender, wise, and enduring literary achievement that will squeeze the reader’s heart with joy and recognition.

Review
"Although O'Brien's strong anti-war feelings are prominent throughout, his principal interest is fatherhood--specifically, at becoming a father later in his life and realizing that he will miss so much of his sons' lives...A miscellany of paternal pride (and frustration) darkened by the author's increasing realizations of his mortality."-- "Kirkus Reviews"


"Winner of the National Book Award in fiction for 1979's Going After Cacciato, O'Brien uses his deft skill of wordplay throughout this latest book....Fans of parenting books, memoirs, and stories of Vietnam War veterans will find enjoyment in these heartfelt words."-- "Library Journal"
About the Author
Tim O'Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013.