Lost in America: A Journey with My Father - Softcover

Nuland, Sherwin B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375727221 ISBN 13: 9780375727221

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004

Synopsis

A writer renowned for his insight into the mysteries of the body now gives us a lambent and profoundly moving book about the mysteries of family. At its center lies Sherwin Nuland’s Rembrandtesque portrait of his father, Meyer Nudelman, a Jewish garment worker who came to America in the early years of the last century but remained an eternal outsider. Awkward in speech and movement, broken by the premature deaths of a wife and child, Meyer ruled his youngest son with a regime of rage, dependency, and helpless love that outlasted his death.

In evoking their relationship, Nuland also summons up the warmth and claustrophobia of a vanished immigrant New York, a world that impelled its children toward success yet made them feel like traitors for leaving it behind. Full of feeling and unwavering observation, Lost in America deserves a place alongside such classics as Patrimony and Call It Sleep.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

“Lost in America is at once funny and heartbreaking, terrifying and lyrical, in its vivid evocation of growing up in a long-vanished immigrant Bronx. I think it is Nuland’s most powerful and beautiful book yet.”
—Oliver Sacks, author of Uncle Tungsten

“Sherwin B. Nuland’s gift is for depicting both the splendors of vitalism and the terrors of entropy in the human. His compassionate but total portrait of his father’s suffering life evokes for me much that was my own father’s frustrations. In a way, Nuland has written a dark epilogue to Philip Roth’s Patrimony, one of the essential American books.”
—Harold Bloom, author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Lost in America is a brutally honest book about a boy, his father, and the shared world they separately inhabit. It is gripping, utterly devoid of sentimentality, and disturbing to read. Yet from the bleakness of his childhood, Sherwin Nuland has written a beautiful memoir of psychological survival and the complexities of love, an unsparing look at shame, defiance, beholdenness, and the saving grace of the American dream. It is a powerful and important book, and deeply moving.”
—Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind

About the Author:

Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., is the author of How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter. He is clinical professor of surgery at Yale, where he also teaches bioethics and medical history. In addition to his numerous articles for medical publications, he has written for The New Yorker, The New Republic, the New York Times, Time, and the New York Review of Books. He writes a regular column for The American Scholar entitled “The Uncertain Art.” Dr. Nuland and his family live in Connecticut.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0375727221
• ISBN 13: 9780375727221
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224