My Father's Cabin - by Mark Phillips (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In the Rust Belt of the 1960s, a blue-collar father works double shifts, chasing elusive dreams: a good night's sleep, eternal life, a cabin in the Allegheny Mountains where he can hunt and fish. His son is a child of the times, chasing his own dreams: girls, long hair, politics, and independence. And both chase the same dream: each other's elusive love. This is a familiar story uniquely told, in a voice that perfectly captures America at its most turbulent, an era that continues to define the largest generation in American history. My Father's Cabin chronicles life in America as the Greatest Generation gives way to the Me Decade, as responsibility gives way to self-fulfillment-and then back again, as responsibility becomes self-fulfillment.

Review Quotes

"I don't believe I have ever read so relentlessly honest, unsentimental and unsparing an account of working-class life. My Father's Cabin is a courageous account of American life that rings painfully true yet is, in its way, strongly affirming."--Joyce Carol Oates

"This account of how a son comes to accept his father's rough, fumbling love, and to return it, despite the chasm between them, is a genuine portrait of the ties that bind families together in difficult times."--Publishers Weekly

"We've heard it all before: a father and son, products of different times and values, struggle to find common ground and to win each other's love and respect. But we've never heard the story told quite this way. . . . In this memorable memoir, the author demonstrates that there is always something new to say on a familiar subject"--Booklist

"Sensitive writing, a continually evolving relationship between parent and child, and commendable personalities make this an engrossing and satisfying book."--Library Journal

"Phillip's writing elevates [his] themes from the topical to art. He writes so well . . . that his 'remembrance of things past' may give many of his readers something new, something grand."--Robert W. Lewis

"A hard-bitten, working-class childhood on the fringes of decaying Buffalo, New York, goes a long way toward rendering freelancer Phillips's memoir into a plaint, an extended ache that finds its way right into the reader's heart. . . . a beautiful thing to behold, fresh air rushing through a scarred system."--Kirkus Review

About the Author

Mark Phillips grew up in Pendleton, in western New York. He is the author of Loveand Hate in the Heartland, and his writing has appeared in New York Times Magazine, TheAmerican Scholar, Commonweal, Salon, and other magazines. His work has been cited in Best American Essays and has received the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers award. He lives in Ischua, New York, in his father's cabin.