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FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. ... Read more

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A step-by-step guide on how to set up your own library of state related books and other materials.Includes tips on using the Dewey Decimal System, creating card catalogs, budgeting and acquiring materials + gives resources for books, art, music, rare books, technology, autographs, etc.Excellent classroom activity.Free teacher's guide gives specific suggestions and instructions on how to get max educational value from this book.Hey, if it's your library, you won't have to pay any late return fees! ... Read more

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In this searing memoir, the author of Final Payments and Men and Angels unearths startling truths about her father, a man who was both a devoted, imaginative, and loving parent and a man desperate to cover up the underside of the immigrant's encounter with the American dream. A brilliant book about memory and reality, loss and love, The Shadow Man is personal memoir elevated to art.Amazon.com Review
For a so-called "Catholic novelist," the revelation thather father was born a Jew qualifies as something of a literarybomblet; that his past was a tissue of fabrications, that he became ananti-Semite and reactionary, is a revelation that haunts this unusualbook. Gordon's search for her father, who died when she was seven,leads her to libraries and archives, to interviews with hisassociates, to family birth records and finally to the extraordinaryproject of disinterring and reburying her father's remains. Thesearch becomes a literary quest in which Gordon transforms herself bytransforming her images of her father. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Commonweal Magazine
For a lengthy review of this book written by Marjorie Steinfels O'Brien in the prestigious magazine Commonweal, go to the magazine's archives. The review is truly sui generis !

An Electra Complex Unrestrained
Much as this reader enjoyed Mary Gordon's other writing, especially Final Payments, he must fault the writer for this maundering, meandering piece of work.Bloviated with rhetorical questions, she plows the same ground over and over again, bemoaning her fate, and crying out, "Why?Why?"One is tempted to respond, "Because.Because."Without the self-conscious and self-serving rhetorical questions, this book would be 1/3 shorter, and it would be improved.If you've ever fantasized about being a psychiatrist, wondering what it would be like to listen at length to someone who refuses to accept life, this book should satisfy you.For the rest of us, let's hope that Gordon finally accepts herself.Frankly, Kathryne Harrison's The Kiss was more fully honest and better written.

Too much self-pity
Author Mary Gordon's intimate biography of her father is told as an account of the author's own adventure in researching and recalling the embarrassing facts of her father's real life.Most of the drama comes inthe author's feelings of betrayal, guilt, and disillusionment, so the bookfunctions more as an autobiography, as is emphasized by a lengthy additiondescribing the author's mother's life.

Gordon has an engaging, lucidstyle, and the first half of the book has some suspense as she pores overrecords and searches out witnesses for the truth about her father's unusuallife.But ultimately the self-pity becomes wearying, and one wishes theauthor could gain some perspective and be grateful for her blessings.

Fascinating memoir of ambivalence
This book is very much in the same vein as Geoffrey Wolff's Duke of Deception... a man who was a failure as a person yet a loving father. A chilling portrait of the ambivalence of knowing one's imperfect parent.

see above
A reader , July 10, 19975 stars A Daughter's Search for Her Father :

This person has got to be an insider! ... Read more