Confession: When I saw that one of my top-five favorite writers in the whole wide world had written a memoir about fatherhood, I felt underwhelmed. O’Brien writes famously deep novels about war and morality and human frailty, not journals addressed to his kids.
I should have known better. This collection of gentle exhortations and not-so-idle musings is worth its weight in gilded-page-edge gold. As expected, it never strays far from O’Brien’s Vietnam calling card, but it’s also of the modern age, an honest, brilliantly conceived attempt by an old man to tell his very young boys everything they might want to know about him and the world once he’s passed on. These pages will appeal to anyone who likes moral philosophy and cultural critiques with their family dynamics. It’s an excellent book.