My Father's Bonus March [Hardcover]

Adam Langer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 20, 2009

To his friends, Seymour Langer was one of the brightest kids to emerge from Chicago’s Depression-era Jewish West Side. To his family, he was a driven and dedicated physician, a devoted father and husband. But to his Adam, youngest son, Seymour was also an enigma: a somewhat distant figure to whom Adam could never quite measure up, a worldly man who never left the city of Chicago during the last third of his life, a would-be author who spoke for years of writing a history of the Bonus March of 1932, when twenty thousand World War I veterans descended on the nation’s capital to demand compensation.

Using this dramatic but overlooked event in U.S. history as a means of understanding his relationship with his father, Adam Langer sets out to uncover why the Bonus March intrigued Seymour Langer, whose personal history seemed to be artfully obscured by a mix of evasiveness and exaggeration. The author interweaves the story of the Bonus March and interviews with such individuals as history aficionado Senator John Kerry and the writer and critic Norman Podhoretz with his own reminiscences and those of his father’s relatives, colleagues, and contemporaries. In the process, he explores the nature of memory while creating a moving, multilayered portrait of both his father and his father’s generation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist Langer (Ellington Boulevard) remembers his late father, a disabled Chicago radiologist, as brilliant and driven, but also distant and contradictory. For more than 30 years, his father talked about writing a history of the Bonus March, which Langer describes as a pivotal but now mostly forgotten event, when some 20,000 WWI veterans marched on Washington for two months during the Depression, demanding advance payment of bonuses due in 1945, until a bloody confrontation with the U.S. cavalry left two protesters dead. The Bonus March comes to represent for Langer a key to my dad's inner life, so he decides to research the event and his father's relationship to it, along the way pondering whether his grandfather, possibly a WWI vet, participated in the march and whether it had particular resonance for a man who had difficulty walking. Langer's interviews range from his father's old friends and relatives to notables like Norman Podhoretz and John Kerry, who modeled his Vietnam protests on the march. Unfortunately, this frustrating combination of personal memoir, biography and American history falls flat as Langer barely scratches the surface of the Bonus March, and his father remains inscrutable and lackluster to readers. (Oct. 20)
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Review

“Chicago’s own bard, Studs Terkel, would be proud, maybe even envious, of Adam Langer’s terrific tale. He weaves American history, his father’s Depression era coming of age, and his own experience growing up in the ’70s and ’80s into a narrative quilt so artful it covers a reader's sensibility with warmth and beauty. This is truly a multigenerational treat.”—Peter Davis, Academy-Award winning directory of Hearts and Minds

“Adam Langer has written a family mystery story that takes the reader back to a complex past, created from other people's recollections and Adam's own pilgrimage to an event hardly touched by American memory.”—Thomas B. Allen, co-author of The Bonus March: An American Epic.

“My Father’s Bonus March is a fascinating and touching book, part personal memoir, part history.  Its examination of the Bonus March of 1932 through the eyes of father and son is an extraordinary exhibition of the personal meanings of history.”—Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent

“A wonderful, heartfelt book.”—Ken Burns

“At last–a memoir that understands the deepest mission of first person narrator, which is to be a steward of history.  Adam Langer’s magnificent documentary work in My Father’s Bonus March is a meticulous reconstruction, part detective story, part elegy, and altogether alluring in its fine attention and relentless search into the Depression and out again.  This remarkable book comes to us just when we need it and has an uncanny and haunting resonance for our times.”—Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist’s Daughter

“My Father's Bonus March is a brilliant and beautiful work of memory, a hymn to boyhood, a hymn to Chicago, that somber city, driven by the need that drives all those rare books that you know, on first encountering, you will re-read and cherish–the need to get back what has been lost.”—Rich Cohen, author of Sweet and Low

“A truly fascinating flashback to the Great Depression. My Father's Bonus March is a work of genuine integrity and wise reflection.”—Douglas Brinkley, author of Tour of Duty and The Great Deluge

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (October 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385523726
• ISBN-13: 978-0385523721
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 0.9 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,331,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Searching for his father..., October 21, 2009

By 

Jill Meyer (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: My Father's Bonus March (Hardcover)

Adam Langer's father - a member of the "Greatest Generation" - was always a mystery to his younger son. Seymour Langer was a radiologist in Chicago for forty years, as well as a husband, father, and friend to many. He grew up on the old West Side of Chicago, a son of Jewish immigrants. He was one of many who made successful lives from poor beginnings.

But Seymour Langer had a dream, an ambition, a "something" - to write a book about the Bonus March, a little remembered event during the later years of the Hoover Administration, continuing on into the Roosevelt years. The Bonus Marchers were a large group of soldiers from the "Great War" (WW1), who had been promised "bonuses" after their war duty. These bonuses were not exactly huge amounts, but to the former soldiers, now suffering in the early years of the Depression, they offered some hope from the poverty they were mired in. Thousands of soldiers got together and marched on Washington in an unsuccessful attempt to claim what they were promised.

Seymour Langer died a few years ago, in his early 80's. Adam Langer, the author of three fabulous novels set in Chicago and New York, chose to write about his father and his obsession with the Bonus March. Where did his father's interest in the Bonus Marchers come from? Adam thought that maybe Seymour's father had been a WW1 soldier - family lore had him as a mule skinner - and that Sam Langer might have had contact with the Bonus Marchers. Why didn't Seymour Langer ever attempt to investigate his subject and write on it?

Adam's book about his father is especially interesting to children of these "Greatest Generation" dads as we try to understand our fathers. Seymour Langer was not a soldier in WW2 because of congenital hip problems, but he was a member of the "Greatest Generation" just the same. Many of us 40, 50, and 60 year olds are left with memories of our fathers, but little substantive knowledge of their inner lives. These were men who grew up in the Depression and fought our last "good war". They returned from active duty, married, produced families, and went to work. And came home from work on a daily basis, and then returned to work the following day. Most of these men were enigmas to their children. And, I've begun to think lately, they were enigmas to themselves.

Great book and great writing.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating nonfiction father-son memoir reads like a thriller, November 6, 2009

By 

Judge Knott "judge_knott" (Upper West Side, NY, NY) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: My Father's Bonus March (Hardcover)

This book might well blow your mind, and it will certainly stay with you. Here's the set-up (without spoiling anything, I hope). Adam Langer (the real-life best-selling novelist born and raised in Chicago) lost his 80-year-old father a few years ago. One question that always gnawed at the son was why his father had spent much of his life wanting to write a study about "The Bonus March," a bloody war-benefits protest staged by thousands of disaffected U.S. World War I veterans in Washington, D.C., during the peak of the Depression. Why, the son wonders, was this protest so important to my father that he wanted to write a book about it? And why didn't he write it?

Langer the novelist, therefore, hangs up the nonfiction apron and sets out a multi-year journey to learn why. His father had never served in the military and was just a child when the Bonus March took place. So why his father's fascination with The Bonus March? In this remarkable first-person memoir, Langer literally travels all across the country and all across the 20th century (archives, photographs, yellowed newspaper clippings, Department of Defense records, eyewitnesses) trying to find out.

I will stop now, because I don't want to give anything away. Suffice it to say that Langer's heart-rending AND heart-wrenching investigation will quite likely make you view your own parents differently, and make you appreciate how special--and indeed mysterious--each of us is.

Three specific compliments to Langer are in order. First of all, this is a non-fiction memoir that--somehow, and rather amazingly--reads like a thriller. I read the book in three sittings over 24 hours: once I had to stop because the reading experience was too intense; the second time I stopped because it was 2:00am and I had go to work the next day; and the third sitting was when I finished the book, immediately after getting home from work.

Second, Langer's gifts as a novelist really pay off here. Although "My Father's Bonus March" is nonfiction, Langer is able to weave together all manner of Proustian sensations (bits of songs, fleeting visual impressions, quickly quoted dialogues) to make it seem that you, the reader, are along with him on his heart-pounding, novel-like quest.

Finally, this book really makes the reader think about what a fascinating if fragile organism any family is, particularly as it passes across continents and down generations, changing in someways and remaining the same in others. I think that this beautiful book will comfort, and also trigger thought, in anyone who has lost a parent and wished they had known that parent better.

Highest recommendation.

5.0 out of 5 stars REMEMBERING THE BONUS MARCH, February 22, 2010

By 

James L. Woolridge "Wooly in PSL, FL." (Sunny Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: My Father's Bonus March (Hardcover)

In 1932 veterns marched on Washingto to get military bonuses advanced in this horrible economic period. In stead of open arms and help, they got bayonets. Adam Langer give the reader a look at the march through his fathers eyes as the writer interprets. This is a poignant look at the time and a closer look as a son tries to discover more about his father. We learn about Langers family as he learns more about himself. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED