Description
Book Synopsis“Chasing Ghosts” describes how the daughter of a World War II veteran comes to understand her emotionally wounded father through his stories about his childhood, naval service in the late 1930s, and wartime experiences, and through the research she undertakes to understand her father’s life in the context of history.
Trade Review"Both a beautifully detailed examination of wartime life and a searingly honest depiction of a fraught father-daughter relationship, Louise DeSalvo's Chasing Ghosts is a unique and valuable contribution to the literature of World War II." -- -Philip Klay author of Redeployment, winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction "A man and his family, inexorably defined by war, rise vividly from the pages of this excellent memoir. Louise DeSalvo remembers her soldier father in a manner both unsparing and elegiac. She roots around at the confounding heart of the filial bond and pulls up something admirably strong, original, and true." -- -Alexandra Styron author of Reading My Father: A Memoir "Louise DeSalvo extends a tradition that includes Montaigne and Emerson and Woolf. She writes to discover something she doesn't know when she starts. Her work becomes: it is transformative-art for the sake of life. She is one of the most accomplished memoir writers of our time. Chasing Ghosts is powerfully executed." -- -Joshua Fausty New Jersey City University "This painstakingly researched work not only explores a daughter's love for her father but also proves the dire effects of war (and particularly of WWII) on families, exposing the deeper "wounds of the soul" suffered by both soldiers and their loved ones." -Publishers Weekly "The "ghosts" [DeSalvo] chases are the ghosts that have been with her all along, shaping her childhood interest in history, and in war stories, and, eventually, in memoir-writing, which, she shows, can provide us with a new an illuminating version of the past" -Times Literary Supplement
Table of ContentsOne War Stories "Join the Navy, See the World" The Sea, the Sea On the Road to Nowhere, Moving Fast Fly Boy Man o' War's Man Dead as a Doornail A Very Smart Ship A Flower, A Sunburst, A Star The First Death Into the Drink Trouble Board War Games When Pigs Can Fly Two "The Girl for Me" "Of Couse I Will" Courtship Safe House Lifeboat Three So Much to Lose, So Much Already Lost Magic Bullet On the Day I Was Born "Hide Your Tears" House Hunting Four Secret Code Command Center The Sailor Who Flew Home on Wings of Air A Knock at the Door Just a Very, Very Few of the Many, Many Who Have Died Rage Chasing Ghosts Ship's Model Mopping Up Cargo Cult Five Coming Home The Evening News The Last Time My Father Almost Died Epilogue Wearing My Father's Bones Sources Acknowledgments
