Word: gordons
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This anguished memoir by novelist Mary Gordon is a desperate search for her father, a self-created enigma who died when she was seven. Perhaps inevitably, the search fails. The father a seven-year-old knows--her hero, her first Prince Charming--does not really exist. But dying, he is frozen forever in a child's adoring perception. At 10, the author recalls, she began to write her father's biography with the words "My father is the greatest man I have ever known...
...David Gordon, however, was a far more complicated case. His daughter's recounting, The Shadow Man (Random House; 274 pages; $24), is well titled; Gordon's shadow was profoundly deceptive. The intellectual who talked of riotous years at Harvard in fact never finished high school. The erudite essayist who had written for the Nation and the Jesuit magazine America was also a literary name dropper and vituperative anti-Semite. The right-wing pamphleteer apparently did write speeches for Senator Joe McCarthy, as he claimed, but the speeches may never have been used. The jaunty, confident head of the family most...
...Catholic International, a magazine he published briefly toward the end of the 1930s, David Gordon praised Mussolini's Italy and raved that Jewish soldiers were being sent to Spain "to help murder nuns in Lincoln's name." Can this be the loving, lighthearted man who taught Mary Gordon to value reading above all other things? "I am losing my father. He is disappearing," she writes of her researches. But she also finds she is losing herself. She had reached adulthood as a fallen-away Catholic intellectual (the thoughts of such a person are the themes of her novels Final Payments...
...clever immigrant boy who taught himself to speak English without an accent (and who spoke several other languages, though never Yiddish) left little trace. His daughter's book turns frantic, and to some extent loses direction, as it becomes clear that she is not going to find David Gordon at the precise point of shame and bitterness when the immigrant experience persuaded him to construct a disguise. There are two great losses here. A little girl loses her father's hand in a swirling crowd. And a boy loses his way as he tries to transform himself as that American...
DIVORCING. Singer LATOYA JACKSON and agent-hubby JACK GORDON; in Las Vegas. Alleging beatings and death threats, Jackson has obtained a temporary protective order...