After more than 30 years at Newsweek
, where he served as New York bureau chief among other roles, Mathews (Hazardous Duty
) turned to writing books, often centering his fiction and nonfiction around the military. His latest project finds him, at "a ridiculously old age," sorting through "steamer trunks" of baggage from an American childhood spent in the shadow of WWII and its aftermath. After an opening chapter that briskly and episodically tells the story of his childhood and struggles with a Greatest Generation father now in his 80s, Mathews, following the advice of an old song, musters nine other father-son dyads and devotes a chapter to each, telling their stories and using them to reflect and refract his relationship with his father, rekindled after years of dormancy. It's a conceit that works terrifically; Mathews avoids mawkishness by delving into his and his friends' unpredictable reactions to unexpected revelations, as the fathers upload material that has been waiting for an audience for decades. Anyone with an opaque-seeming father will find compelling the emotive core of this book—in which seeming tough guys manage to find and repair (though not without difficulty) a great deal of damage—and those who collect Greatest Generation lore will not be disappointed, either. Agent, Alice Martell.
(On sale May 10)
