Priscilla Kipp

From his rare centenarian perch, Pulitzer Prize winner and World War II epic novelist Herman Wouk surveys the ups and downs of his long literary life—and the deep faith that has accompanied him throughout—in his delightfully sanguine memoir, Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author.

The book’s title holds the two threads of his work, Wouk notes. “Sailor” refers to the scope of his writing life and the experiences that inspired him, and “Fiddler,” as in Fiddler on the Roof’s Tevye, underscores the proudly Jewish author’s own “spiritual journey.” Wouk’s ability to weave these two strands together creates a unique framework to consider a life lived long and well.

Wouk's experiences as a naval officer in World War II inspired his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny.

Wouk might as well be inviting the reader to pull up a chair by the fire and have a listen over tea, so companionably chatty is the once-reticent writer. He is a man at peace with his age and his work. The latter, he seems reluctantly ready to admit, may finally be complete—although maybe not. In a 2012 New York Times interview, asked if he planned to stop writing any time soon, he answered, “What am I going to do? Sit around and wait a year?” And here he is once more, content “for the chance to please you through my books.”

The boy from the Bronx grew up loving a hard-working Russian-Jewish immigrant father who enjoyed “convulsing us kids with his drolleries in Yiddish.” The young Wouk also feasted on Twain’s humor, learned from Dumas’ action-packed narratives and took lessons about a writer’s fame from Melville, whose work came to life only 30 years after his death. Wouk then aspired to be “a funny writer, nothing else.” He succeeded, graduating from Columbia College and working as a gag writer for Fred Allen’s popular radio show, among others. Then came Pearl Harbor.

For Wouk, life didn’t get in the way of his writing: It became his writing. Experiences as a naval officer on the destroyer warship USS Zane, with its “crazy captain,” would become The Caine Mutiny (1951), earning him the Pulitzer Prize. Marjorie Morningstar, which landed him on the cover of Time, borrowed his mother’s family name, Morgenstern, Yiddish for Morningstar. Youngblood Hawke, he notes, is the what-if part of his life had he not met and married Betty Sarah, the love of his life as well as his literary agent. What he learned from military figures, historians and fellow veterans would inform The Winds of War (1971). His “main task . . . to bring the Holocaust to life in a frame of global war,” inspired War and Remembrance. Both novels earned Wouk a global audience; mixed, sometimes scathing, reviews; and popular success as the books became landmark television mini-series.

Now the novelist reveals the real-life sources for his fictitious characters, recounting their stories and contributions. He recalls the years spent doing prodigious amounts of research while trying to hold onto his confidence and get the words right (The Winds of War took seven years to finish; War and Remembrance, another seven). His fame has continued to fluctuate, but he still chooses his words carefully, mostly avoiding spite, melancholy or regret.

While The Atlantic recently praised him as “The Great War Novelist America Forgot,” here Wouk has what may well be the final word: “Other things in the literary life may have ceased to matter that much, but I have always loved the work.”

Priscilla Kipp is a writer in Townsend, Massachusetts.

In this captivating companion to the sensational book and 1991 movie Not Without My Daughter, it is the daughter’s turn to tell her tale. Now grown, educated and fiercely independent, Mahtob Mahmoody recounts her harrowing escape with her mother from a tyrannical and abusive father in war-torn Iran. The years that follow, back in the U.S.A., are fraught with fear that the father will follow and reclaim his daughter. Instead of seeking anonymity, Mahtob’s mother, Betty Mahmoody, chooses to publicize their plight and the failure of U.S. and international laws to protect victims of international kidnappings. Loopholes get tightened and laws change as Betty becomes a passionate advocate for such injustices. Mahtob has no choice but to share the burden of her mother’s work: frequent travel, journalists asking probing questions and the constant threat of her father’s intervention.

Even changing her name temporarily to Amanda and reasserting her faith as a Christian do not alter the fact that Mahtob is her Muslim father’s daughter, and he wants her back. He stalks her dreams and threatens her security, engaging strangers to call and email her relentlessly, and even invade her apartment. Mahtob suffers from the debilitating effects of lupus and struggles with intimate relationships. She is unable to move on with her life until a psychology course assignment to “collect happiness” by keeping a daily list of five things that make her happy and sharing it with her classmates, seemingly impossible tasks, forces her to see things differently. Mahtob discovers she can change her life by changing her attitude. Before long, her disease is in remission and she is able to rid herself of many medications and their side effects. 

In My Name Is Mahtob, forgiveness comes in stages and takes many forms. It is a journey she bravely shares, as she discovers a “pleasure that there is not in vengeance.”

At 51, his days full of work and travel as an Emmy Award-winning correspondent for CNN, Tom Foreman relaxes in what free time he has. He ignores the added pounds and growing lethargy until the day his 18-year-old daughter asks, “Will you run a marathon with me?” Foreman is too loving a dad to say no, and way too far past his days as a competitive runner to rise easily to her challenge.

In Foreman’s witty and endearing chronicle, My Year of Running Dangerously, we follow his transformation from self-described couch potato to marathoner, then ultra-marathoner. You don’t have to be a runner to understand—and feel—the blood, sweat and tears Foreman pours into his training and his first marathon with his daughter, the one he ran for her and—she later admits—she ran for him, to get him off that couch.

About halfway through this well-paced read, you may be asking, as does Foreman himself, why endure such punishment? The marathons and half-marathons keep coming, and then there is the 50-plus mile ultra-marathon he cannot resist giving a try. His brother survives a heart attack. His mother worries he’s next. His wife and daughters adjust, and readjust, to accommodate his all-consuming obsession. Foreman admits he cannot even manage one night out with his frustrated wife without bringing up his next run. Yet, lucky for him, those closest to Foreman rise to go the distance in offering their support. Together they learn that the goal is to go on challenging yourself, period. Balance comes with the eventual realization that, consequently, life is fuller and each moment richer. 

Anyone who runs, has been inspired by their own child or has tried to accomplish something difficult will find plenty worth pondering in the story of Foreman and his family. Life, he concludes, “is worth more than just living.” You just need to go for it.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When his 15-year old son, Samori, was devastated by the news that Ferguson, Missouri police had been exonerated in the death of Michael Brown, Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at The Atlantic and an eloquent, powerful voice on the subject of race relations, felt compelled to address his son’s despair. The resulting book was originally scheduled for publication in September, but was rushed into print by publisher Spiegel & Grau in response to a surge in interest that followed the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina.

An angry, proud, despairing, vigilant, fearful and fiercely loving father, Coates watches his son confront what he calls the barriers, distances and breaches that stand Between the World and Me (the phrase comes from a poem by Richard Wright). Offering wisdom as well as comfort, he guides Samori through these challenges as they concern the African diaspora, the range and significance of which Coates first glimpsed as a student at Howard University. Growing up in Baltimore, he had to learn the culture and ways of the gang-oriented street in order to survive. He was an indifferent student saved from a predictable fate by the discipline and expectations of his own father. He tells his son how he arrived in Washington, D.C., dazzled by the global span of black scholars, poets, music-makers and activists he finds there. He discovers a new kind of power in learning from them his true heritage and legacy, far removed from the white version of the American Dream.

Initially dismissive of the nonviolent protestors of the civil rights movement, Coates is inspired by the more pragmatic Malcolm X. With an honesty that is intimate and endearing, he recounts for Samori the moment when he fully realizes his country’s unacknowledged, deeply troubling history: In 2001, Prince Jones, an innocent African-American friend, is killed by a Maryland policeman. The officer is exonerated.

Coates understands that he cannot protect his son. Children born into African-American families, he says, come already endangered: Parents beat their children first so that police will not beat or kill them later. It is not enough to want or expect police to change. He believes reform cannot happen unless we as a nation change, recognizing that they are us.

In a June 2014 article for The Atlantic (“The Case for Reparations”), Coates catalogued a history of institutionalized wrongs inflicted upon African Americans, ranging from government policies to fraudulent business practices. Now Coates likens such racism to a disembodiment, and he calls on Samori—named for an African king who died resisting foreign rule—to reclaim his identity, his body.

Ultimately, Coates’ powerful message, driven by a parent’s love, remains painfully hopeful. The struggle for change has meaning, and questions matter, perhaps even more than the answers.

Bob Morris may have disappointed, infuriated and befuddled his parents along the way, but he loves them enough to keep trying to get it right. In Bobby Wonderful: An Imperfect Son Buries His Parents, a memoir that offers few sentimental excuses while laying bare his big, if often misguided, heart, Morris does an unforgettable job of trying to redeem himself. He even manages to share the humor in it all. Anyone who has ever had to survive that heart-piercing time when the parent becomes the child, the child finds himself a most reluctant caregiver, and both are miserably needy, will see themselves in this familiar familial tale. As NPR’s Scott Simon recently said about his own memoir, Unforgettable, “There are some lessons that only grief and responsibility can teach us.”

When Morris’ mother lies dying after a years-long decline, her son—a successful writer and happily married, middle-aged gay man—questions how well he has done by her. Could he have made her days and agonizing death easier? Yet his name is the last word she utters when he finally, reluctantly reaches her deathbed. Now is the time to commit to being a better son for his father’s remaining years. No easy task: His father is as eccentric as he is lovable, and not one to go calmly anywhere. Soon the octogenarian has a long-distance girlfriend and a longer list of needs, as his health rapidly fails. When the son can manage to overcome his own impatience and annoyance, they have quite the time together. It is a painful, comical push and pull as together they navigate through to that final hour.

Exclaiming “Wonderful!” as he gives up the pump keeping him alive, the father achieves a dignified death. Morris takes this final word as a blessing due a good son. He combines it with his mother’s last word to create the title that begins this story of memorable endings.

Grandparents who love their only grandchild fiercely, but haven’t spoken since their divorce 50 years ago, incite her urgent question: What happened? As she writes in A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France, Miranda Richmond Mouillot hopes to recreate a fairy tale of love found, and somehow lost, amid the turmoil of World War II. But her grandparents, Armand and Anna, are growing frail and their memories of fleeing Nazi-occupied France are painful.

Anna, who lives in New York, deftly dodges specifics, all the while encouraging her granddaughter to move on and seek a life for herself in the French village where the couple’s abandoned house is sinking into ruin. In Geneva, Armand rages at any mention of his ex-wife, while his granddaughter’s probing questions try to stop his memory from slipping into the shadows of dementia.

Mouillot is haunted by her own nightmares that often pitch her into unexplainable despair, fears that, she learns, are the burden that descendants of the Holocaust must carry. Along with her grandparents’ gradually revealed history come details of horror and heartbreak—allowing her to finally understand her dreams.

Mouillot takes the reader along on her quest to learn what went wrong with her grandparents’ marriage, skillfully interweaving past and present as she tries to restore their ruined home and falls in love herself. Written with an almost poetic transcendence of time, place and memory, this moving memoir chronicles an amazing circle of life. No fairy tale, it is as epic as the times in which Anna and Armand lived and the love they inspired.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.