My Father's War: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Julia Collins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 22, 2002

Jerry Collins was emotionally scarred by “the good war” and failed to live up to the standards set for the men of his era. He found unlikely solace: Collins began confiding in his daughter about the war before she turned five. Drawing on her recollections and a suitcase of her father’s old letters and photographs, Julia Collins pieces together his experience during the war, his return home, and his subsequent descent — offering a new perspective on the men of “the greatest generation.” Photographs are included in this Book Sense 76 pick.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Freelance writer Collins has written a poetic, haunting account of her father's experiences in WWII and their devastating impact on his family. In 1943, Jerry Collins, confident, idealistic and ambitious, left Yale's accelerated wartime program to serve in the elite Marine Corps. Stationed in Okinawa, he witnessed the burning of homes and villages, the pain of dying children and indiscriminate bombings by both sides. When he returned home three years later, wracked by survivor's guilt and nightmares, he had lost his dreams of becoming a chemist. He instead pursued the American dream by becoming a salesman, and failed wretchedly at it. His wife, distraught by her husband's limitations and infidelities, plunged into self-destructive bouts of alcoholism. Only the writer was privy to her father's private burdens; when she was still young, he began to share with her the psychic scars he carried as a survivor of war ("He had brought the war home, where it grew inside him, usurping part of his soul"). While Collins seems convinced that the family's travails can be traced back to her father's three years overseas, her supposition may be a bit simplistic. Jerry's wife emerges from the text as a disturbed, shallow ingrate who craves Coach handbags and Shalimar perfume. Would she have been all that different had her husband been a successful chemist? Nevertheless, the book is a powerful, moving and timely story of one family touched by "the good war's" collateral damage.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In fusing her own experiences and memories with those of her father, Collins explores the effects of war not only on the participants but also on their families. Collins's father was a World War II marine veteran who served in the Pacific theater, and the author, his confidante and daughter, took on her father's memories and his shortcomings at a very young age. A writer for the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and other publications, Collins divides this work into different periods of her own life while interspersing her father's wartime letters and chronicling his hardships in small-town, postwar America. Collins shares with the reader two perspectives, showing how wartime trauma can affect the soldier and how those traumatic experiences can then subtly influence the young even into adulthood. The book begins with Collins, now the adult confidante of her war-damaged father, running interference as he has flashback visions that turn the New Haven Hospital staff into wartime assailants. This is an affecting portrayal of human frailty, the parent-child bond, and a daughter's coming to terms with her parent's failings. Recommended for public libraries. Maria C. Bagshaw, Lake Erie Coll., Painesville, OH
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows (April 22, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568582242
• ISBN-13: 978-1568582245
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,776,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enduring Love, June 6, 2002

By 

Timothy A. Burgard (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Father's War: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Some years ago, during an annual pilgrimage to Branford, CT to pay my respects to a lost loved-one, I noticed a gravestone adorned with shell offerings in St. Agnes Cemetery. Knowing of my Branford connection, an old friend recommended this book, which reveals that these shells were left by the author, Julia Mary Collins, at the grave of her father, Jeremiah Collins.

The author evokes the deep roots of her family in Branford, a coastal New England town that was in the autumn of its economic prime, yet still suffused with the natural beauties of sea and shore, and sustained by family trees and traditions. Despite a childhood tempered by the Great Depression and fading family fortunes, Jeremiah Collins nonetheless believed in a brighter future and a share of the American Dream.

His aspirations, along with his innocence and idealism, perished in the fiery crucible of the battle for the Pacific Island of Okinawa, in which over 250,000 soldiers and civilians perished. Cast adrift with his altered worldview and survivor's guilt in his unchanged hometown of Branford, Corporal Collins existed in a tenuous state of suspension between the still living and the dead.

The author, who became her father's confidante, perceptively and movingly captures his physical anguish and psychic pain, as well as its lasting impact on her family. Her book serves as a deeply human counterweight to the sea of books that celebrate the triumphs of WWII, but assiduously avoid the incalculable costs for "the greatest generation."

Julia Collins writes "let me bring back my dad, the way he was when I was seven, just before I began to lose him for good." She has not only resurrected her father, she has delivered the eloquent eulogy he deserves, and has gently and lovingly laid him and his anguish to rest, finally at peace in the earth of his native Branford.

The sunbleached shells she leaves at her father's grave, washed ashore from the Atlantic ocean of Jeremiah Collins's childhood, but resonant with the Pacific ocean where he fought his greatest battles, bear silent witness to her enduring love.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Ordinary-Dysfunctional American Family, June 5, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: My Father's War: A Memoir (Hardcover)

This book is a testament to the uniqueness and isolation of each "ordinary" American family. The author perfectly captures the claustrophobia of a dysfunctional family. The whole family seems trapped in a childlike powerlessness to change their destinies or control events;you forgive the children, you have difficulty forgiving the parents. World War II seems a small thing in comparison to the larger war on Collins Drive.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Prisoners, June 4, 2002

By 

Marc Solomon (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Father's War: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Without 20:20 hindsight or wishful thinking, Julia Collins has written a graceful and moving work that stares straight into the failings of her father as a war hero, husband, breadwinner and parent and somehow manages to elevate and dignify the person her dad was. This challenge made all the more difficult by having Jeremiah Collins pose for a portrait that in life, he would never have held.

My Fathers War is not the retelling of one ex-Marines pointless miseries but wisdom collected from the perspective of the point-blank battles that raged on the homefront long after the formal surrender of any proclaimed American enemy.