Lost in America: A Journey with My Father [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Sherwin B. Nuland (Author, Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 7, 2003

He walks with me through every day of my life, in that unsteady, faltering gait that so embarrassed me when I was a boy. Always, he is holding fast to the upper part of my right arm . . . As we make our way together, my father—I called him Daddy when I was small, because it sounded American and that is how he so desperately wanted things to seem—is speaking in the idiosyncratic rhythms of a self-constructed English.

So Sherwin Nuland introduces Meyer Nudelman, his father, a man whose presence continues to haunt Nuland to this day. Meyer Nudelman came to America from Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, when he was nineteen. Pursuing the immigrant’s dream of a better life but finding the opposite, he lived an endless round of frustration, despair, anger, and loss: overwhelmed by the premature deaths of his first son and wife; his oldest surviving son disabled by rheumatic fever in his teens; his youngest son, Sherwin, dutiful but defiant, caring for him as his life, beset by illness and fierce bitterness, wound to its unalterable end.

Lost in America, Nuland’s harrowing and empathetic account of his father’s life, is equally revealing about the author himself. We see what it cost him to admit the inextricable ties between father and son and to accept the burden of his father’s legacy.

In Lost in America, Sherwin Nuland has written a memoir at once timeless and universal.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his late 30s and early 40s, National Book Award winner Nuland (How We Die) was gripped by a depression so unyielding to treatment he almost underwent a lobotomy (the procedure was halted by a young resident psychiatrist who refused to listen to his superiors). But as haunting as this beginning of Nuland's memoir is, it's eclipsed in power by the story he tells of his relationship with his father, an aging Jewish immigrant whose life was a series of family tragedies and illness. Avoiding the twin traps of nostalgia and emotional overkill, Nuland details, in beautiful, stark prose, his father's harsh life in America. Meyer Nudelman worked, and failed at, a variety of jobs and was broken by the death of his first child, the death of his wife and the near-fatal illness of another son. For him, America was never a land of opportunity, and his life sank into various debilitating physical ailments and unpredictable rages that inflicted terrible damage upon his son. The memoir's deep, shocking, emotional impact comes when Nuland, a student at Yale medical school, discovers by reading a textbook that his father's physical symptoms all indicated that he was suffering his whole adult life from tertiary syphilis. The shock of this discovery-which Meyer's doctors knew, but never told him-doesn't lead to an easy resolution. "In America" the author writes, "Meyer Nudelman was a man with no past," and by the end of the book readers realize that his dreams of a happier future were also impossible. Written with enormous empathy, yet without a hint of sentimentality, Nuland's memoir is both heartbreaking and breathtaking.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Conspicuously absent from Nuland's How We Die, a National Book Award winner in 1994, the author's father dominates this new memoir. In contrast to the graceful How We Die, this book appears conflicted, crowded, and emotion-laden, with Nuland allowing readers no distance from his discomfiting exploration of his relationship with his father, Meyer. Nuland describes his father's troubles as an immigrant from Bessarabia (between Russia and Romania) who struggled with unfulfilling, low-wage work and the early death of his wife and first son. He brings his father's voice to life by reproducing his heavily accented English and occasional use of Yiddish. The journey recounted is a personal and painful one, and Nuland's attempt is not to universalize this experience but to come to terms with it for his own understanding. Raw, personal autobiographies easily find their way to readers, and this book by Nuland, a departure from some of his better-known works, will attract a different audience. Larger public libraries will want to add this to their collections.
Audrey Snowden, GSLIS (student), Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Random House Audio Voices; Unabridged edition (January 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0739302159
• ISBN-13: 978-0739302156
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 5.1 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,204,222 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sherwin B. Nuland is Clinical Professor of Surgery at Yale University School of Medicine and a Fellow at Yale's Institute for Social and Policy Studies. He is the author of over ten books, including the National Book Award-winning, HOW WE DIE: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, an inquiry into the causes and modes of death that spent 34 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. In addition he is a contributor to leading publications including the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Searing memoir and eulogy of love, May 3, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lost in America: A Journey with My Father (Hardcover)

Whoa, this is a hard one. Lost in America, written by the gifted Nuland, is an ode to his father, a work of self-therapy for himself, a gift to his readers, and an offering to anyone looking for resolution and understanding of a difficult family situation.
Lost in America begins with the author admitting to coming under the grips of debilitating depression, and the writing of this book seems to have been his way of fighting out of that despair, of coming to terms with some of its causes, and of trying to explain all that went wrong with his father's life as a Jewish immigrant in America - and how those failures impacted Sherwin Nuland. The turning point comes with Nuland's discovery that his father suffered the mental and neurological effects of late-stage syphilis - and with his acceptance that happiness for him would be impossible.
Heartbreaking and oh, so beautifully written. But also difficult (on an emotional level) to read; you may find yourself putting it aside for a few days before wanting to continue. But persevere and read to the end. You won't regret it.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Illuminating and touching book, January 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Lost in America: A Journey with My Father (Hardcover)

This isn't the kind of book I normally read, but it was given to me before I went on vacation. I just picked it up one night and couldn't put it down. Nuland first takes the reader on a familiar journey as a son of poor immigrants struggling to survive in a new country. In widening circles of description, recognition, and, finally, illumination, Nuland allows the reader to accompany him in his own journey to understanding and perhaps forgiving the person who influenced his life so strongly. The book is funny and tragic and very very moving.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful and deeply moving, April 20, 2003

By 

E. Davis "E. Davis" (Bloomfield, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lost in America: A Journey with My Father (Hardcover)

In an earlier book, Dr. Nuland told us How We Die. That book gave me some understanding and comfort following my father's death. In this beautifully-written and heart-wrenching memoir, Dr. Nuland tries to come to terms with his own father's death and in doing so, manages to exorcise some demons.
This is a very brave memoir in that the author spares no one, including himself. It is at once brutally honest (sometimes so much so, that I had to stop reading) and incisive. His prose style--unusual for a doctor--is lyrical and succinct. He tells his story from a uniquely Jewish perspective (naturally) and so I wondered if readers with other religious affiliations would respond in the same way. Perhaps it doesn't matter. The book is a winner and I am enriched from having read it.