Customer Reviews

Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son

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Hochschild has written a gentle and elegant portrait of his family. I chose this book by pure luck (and Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost). I have been rewarded handsomely. It is one of my absolute favorite memoirs that I have ever read. It disturbed me, it moved me and set me on the way to examining and recalling my own memories, especially of the beauty of lost summers of yesteryear. Yet the book is able to deal with the complexities of extraordinarily difficult relationships, class and race consciousness and the very nature of power in society in a though provoking and beautiful way. Most importantly, Hochschild teaches that the past and all whom we know and love will live on within us.

I read this book in 1988 for an autobiography class, and reread it about once a year. It is the only book that has ever brought me to tears. Anyone with a parent who kept their relationships with their children strictly formal will identify with this book.

A memoir of the author's relationship with his father, Harold, whom he did not appreciate or understand as a child. He grew up in a privileged environment, as his father was a wealthy businessman, but received a lot of harsh criticism from his father. However, after marriage and two sons, he developed an understanding of his father's background and an unexpected peace finally was made between them. A well-written, hard-to-put-down book--deeply moving.

I found this book in the wonderful Morristown, NY library marked "Overdue Fines Apply" which means folks have been keeping it beyond the due date to reread it and pass it around. As soon as I finished it I went on Amazon and bought my own copy to pass around my family and north country friends. It is crafted as superbly as a St. Lawrence River skiff and portrays the contradictions of idyllic summers in the Adirondacks, suffocating but sublimated tensions between "Father"--that's what he was always called throughout the boy's life!--and this only-child author, who wondered early on what it could mean that his family, the scions of a copper-mining fortune, could be so privileged in a world where mineral wealth was more valued than human life. It is a great story, a great read, and casts shadows not so unlike those we all see in our own lives and families. The Thousand Islands and the Adirondacks are places of lower and middle class economic struggle with scores if not hundreds of places where the monied families of the Gilded Age spent their fortunes and created mythic lifestyles. Nobody has caught the results better.
Now excuse me, but I've got to back to Amazon to get what I was looking for in the village library--Hochschild's latest in a terrific line of historic portrayals of colonial Africa, colonial slavery, Stalin and, now, World War ITo End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

Jim Doyle