$19.94 with 17 percent savings
List Price: $24.00

The List Price is the suggested retail price of a new product as provided by a manufacturer, supplier, or seller. Except for books, Amazon will display a List Price if the product was purchased by customers on Amazon or offered by other retailers at or above the List Price in at least the past 90 days. List prices may not necessarily reflect the product's prevailing market price.
Learn more
$3.99 delivery May 23 - 30. Details
In stock
Usually ships within 3 to 4 days.
$$19.94 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$19.94
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Ships from
SuperBookDeals-
Ships from
SuperBookDeals-
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt. You may receive a partial or no refund on used, damaged or materially different returns.
Read full return policy
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt. You may receive a partial or no refund on used, damaged or materially different returns.
Read full return policy
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Payment
Secure transaction
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Paul West
+ Follow
More books from this author
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

My Father's War: A Memoir Hardcover – July 1, 2005

by Paul West (Author)
5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 3 ratings
See all formats and editions
{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$19.94","priceAmount":19.94,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"19","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"94","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"kVDcO0DqCuNkus77Qh%2BDu1%2BFYkBDuyF9ex2yf4OsSbOX%2FC87hGWH%2BJLXvxJ67LTWVDtfbL5iTDZKvd707HiaPF9phwZFSpR6dZCOMN7Dq0VgJ5LHXN8ovOzdso6QfIewVvt%2FY6o8T4TacHp5mFwVYoyMIWTqCkXHn4ONV6M8CJhs8HEc8sL5CQ%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

Eight years ago acclaimed novelist Paul West presented a warmly received memoir of his mother, My Mother's Music. Revisiting the scene now, Paul West delivers in his 40th book an equally remarkable memoir of his father, a half-blinded, shell-shocked veteran of three years of trench warfare during 'The War to End All Wars.' But the time recounted mostly occupies 1939 to 1945, while ten-year-old Paul grows to fifteen. Together, father and son play war games, guarding the English coast from foxholes under the kitchen table, or watching as real Nazi bombers on moonlit nights pass overhead. The father, meanwhile, is forever instructing the son in the details of his own experience. The two have much in common, though distantly, and the boy Paul slowly learns to understand and even second-guess his father, though the compulsions that possess the war veteran remain a mystery that separates their generations—a conundrum of what the son wishes his still-damaged father could be, and those expectations no father can ever quite live up to. In this engaging memoir, Paul West recreates his own youth, and gives us in twenty-five chiseled chapters a view of two lives evoking the deep effects of war, and conveying the distance between those who survive its devastations, and those who must bear its consequence.
Read more Read less
  Report an issue with this product or seller
Previous page
  1. Print length
    187 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    McPherson
  4. Publication date
    July 1, 2005
  5. Dimensions
    6.28 x 0.79 x 8.82 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0929701755
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0929701752
  8. See all details
Next page
The Amazon Book Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist West follows up his well-received My Mother's Music with this intimate memoir of his war-scarred father. West focuses on his own early teenage years in Britain during WWII, when his father's experience as a WWI machine-gunner loomed large in West's imagination. Sight impaired and sporadically employed because of a war wound, West's father seemed set apart from the family, with his ordeal in the trenches making him detached and giving him an almost bemused perspective on civilian life's vicissitudes. It is through those everyday details that West approaches this enigmatic figure, through a rambling accretion of mundane but vividly rendered scenes of his father smoking, eating breakfast, watching a soccer match or playing war with his son underneath the kitchen table. Eventually, West comes to appreciate his father's quiet heroism. Writing in an intensely personal, at times bafflingly hermetic language, West teases out a tender, wryly funny portrait of his father and of the ravages and legacies of war.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

West, a writer of finesse, amplitude, and wit, paid homage to his English village boyhood and his music-teacher mother in his sparkling memoir, My Mother's Music (1996). He now remembers his father, whom he describes as "part ghost," an "impenitent original," and a "man of mystery." His enigmatic father joined the army at age 15, serving as a machine gunner in the wretched trenches of World War I until a shell blinded him. He eventually regained sight in one eye but remained profoundly marked by his ordeal as yet another world war coalesced. West describes his father in startlingly tactile detail as he recounts the wrenching war stories his father told him, and marvels over how they played war, and rushed outside to watch the Nazi bombers. West's sensitivity to the vagaries of temperament is exquisite, his tenderness deeply moving. Writing of wars past in a time of war, West creates a portrait of his father that has all the richness of Rembrandt as it evokes the endless suffering wars precipitate. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ McPherson; First Edition (July 1, 2005)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 187 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0929701755
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0929701752
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.28 x 0.79 x 8.82 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 3 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Paul West

Paul West

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

5 out of 5 stars
5 out of 5
3 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Diane Ackerman
5.0 out of 5 stars Read it in one sitting.
Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2005
Verified Purchase
What a gorgeous read this book is. Paul West addresses his father in glowing terms, and in absolutely astonishing prose, as ever. But it's also a vivid sortie into village life during WWII, with powerful dramas, and all sorts of quirky neighbors and relatives. Some of the scenes are unforgettable! Wonderful book.
2 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Kathryn Atwood
5.0 out of 5 stars A Son's Discovery of a Soldier Father Between Two Wars
Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2005
For writer Paul West, the connections between the two world wars of the last century transcend the likes of a train car at Compiegne and a Bavarian corporal named Adolph Hitler. West's connections are personal, powerful memories of a one-eyed father, maimed in the Great War, playing war games with his son while Nazi planes regularly bombed a nearby English town. West's father, forever transformed by "his war," was an enigma and mystery to West; My Father's War is his attempt to work out that mystery.

As West seeks to assemble the puzzle pieces at his disposal, a beautiful and moving portrait of his father emerges: a teenager issuing from the mud and blood of WWI trenches who became a respected veteran never quite comfortable with peacetime. His discomfort with post-war life far surpassed his frequent unemployment due to his war-damaged eye. When other Englishmen were hiding in their homes with their curtains drawn during Nazi air raids, West's father would go outside to watch the planes, partly because he had come to admire the Germans while fighting them on the western front and partly because, as West relates, he was "going after some sullen undesirable beauty he must first have seen from the trenches." Beauty in the trenches? Yes. It was there that "he had found men at their noblest." He never stopped longing for that beauty but it almost completely evaded him during his civilian life. That is, until the outbreak of the second world war: then, for a few years, he embraced the beauty of his old war with a salute to the new. He began to teach his pre-adolescent son soldering through war games.

Is it possible that the senior West played war with his son in order to prepare him for real warfare? Possibly. No one knew how long World War II would last. But perhaps the more likely reason was that "the only busyness he regarded as genuine toil was soldering. All the rest, which is to say life's work, he regarded as frippery, trivia." He was first and last, a soldier.

The book is comprised of a series of essays, some previously published, written in novelist West's inimitable prose which is so lyrical at times, it occasionally threatens to leave earth (and some readers) behind. In the chapter entitled "An Extraordinary Mildness," West describes his father's later years in terms of a certain lightness of existence: "almost all the woes of the human condition [were] floating away from him, although ascending with him toward the nullity that, compared with his post-mortem paradises, was the merest tincture of slightness." Excellent prose? Well, yes. Slightly incomprehensible? Definitely.

If West's writing sometimes aviates into clouds of rarified incomprehensibility, it also (and usually) soars into prose of pure gold. Ruminating on Hitler's reticence to invade England, West opines: "If only Hitler the knowitall had followed through, brushing aside the popguns and Robin Hood pikes along with the remnants of the British army, we would all have been goners; but by then he was lusting eastward toward Mother Russia and "Uncle Joe," and my father and I had joined the survivors in the street, crisp with our sense of reprieve." West exhibits his formidable descriptive skills while watching his father watch American bombers returning from the mainland: "Not a bomber left its place on this return trip as the crews, with the correct bustle and protocol of bombing left behind, tuned in to swing music on the American Forces Network, chewed fresh gum, and over the sea slung out their machine guns and other gubbins to lighten the load."

Was West was able, at last, to completely understand his father? The emotive center of his book focuses not on the mystery solved but the journey through it. Whether writing in convoluted or golden prose, West has succeeded in piecing together a very moving account of his father, an eternal soldier, discovered by his son between two wars.
One person found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
John Matlock
5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful Story into a Parent's Life
Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2006
All of us whose parents have passed on wish we could have shared moments like these with our fathers. Perhaps we did, but then we lacked the skill that Paul West brings to the printed word. In this book Mr. West relates the story of his being ten yers old in a small English village at the beginning of World War II.

The elder Mr. West had been a machine gunner for three years beginning at age fifteen during World War I. Blinded by an exploding shell, he was at least a semi invalid for the rest of his life. By the time of the Second World War he and young Paul are able to play together. And with Nazi bombers overhead they play at war. They guard the English coast from a foxhole under the kitchen table. They go outside to see the real bombers on their missions.

I suspect that Paul West didn't write, didn't know how to write these words about his father until now, much later. He probably had to wait until he had children of his own to begin to understand the rare glimpse he had into his fathers life. But now it shows an insight that most of us would like to have.
Helpful
 Report