Fathers

Q: Father’s Day is June 16^th – so there’s time for you to recommend some crime-themed reading that could be a useful gift idea for dads of different ages, and with different interests…and allow those reading the blog to order it, and get it in time to wrap it!

from Susan

Both my father and my step-father are long since deceased and my relationship with both was complicated. My father was a war correspondent in WWII, whom my mother divorced when I was five or six and whom I really didn't know since he was in Europe, then the Philippines, then Paris. I re-met him when I was a teenager and he was a TYV anchor and newsman. He was rather a cold fish. 

My step-father was a documentary filmmaker, way to the left of any political center, a man of high ideals and a subversive nature. He covered the labor movement (he was for unions), integration of schools (he was passionate in the move toward equality) , American farming's move to industrial farming (totally opposed), and American manufacturing. On the latter, he apparently suffused his films for the Department of Agriculture with sly attacks on the negative ways he saw workers being undercut and profits increased at their cost (this was in the 1950s), so much so that a whole chapter in a recent scholarly book was dedicated to an admiring examination of the sub-messages in his films. I'm pretty sure I get my values from him! Oh, and he was called before HUAC but didn't give names.

Neither of them, Ivy League educated from prominent families would have needed any book recommendations from me and I'm quite sure they read more widely and deeply than I do.

So, here's to all the less-complicated father-child relationships.