And When Did You Last See Your Father?

Rating:
Summary: An important book to read
Review: After his father was diagnosed with cancer, Blake Morrison & his family watch him quickly deteriorate & die within a matter of weeks. In trying to come to terms with his death, the author takes you back to the times he spent with his father through childhood to adolescence & adulthood. He writes an honest account of his feelings towards his father both good & bad, alternating between memories of the past & the current trauma of watching him fade away.

His experience is not unique which makes this a very important book to read.

Rating:
Summary: An important book to read
Review: After his father was diagnosed with cancer, Blake Morrison & his family watch him quickly deteriorate & die within a matter of weeks. In trying to come to terms with his death, the author takes you back to the times he spent with his father through childhood to adolescence & adulthood. He writes an honest account of his feelings towards his father both good & bad, alternating between memories of the past & the current trauma of watching him fade away.

His experience is not unique which makes this a very important book to read.

Rating:
Summary: The love hate relationship of a son with his father.
Review: I very English book, a small social commentary on the parts of Britain and a class of British life that the foreign visitor rarely sees. Until recently, all through Britain the local Doctor ( or G.P. as he would also be known) was looked up to as being something else, something better and yet had contact to all classes. In the days up until the 1960's, he was perhaps the only person in a village other than the local Church of England clergyman that had been to a University; as a result the Doctor's son was considered something unusual. In my English schooldays in the 1950's, the sons of Doctors were certainly regarded so. Blake Morrison has written a book of childhood to adulthood memories of his father. The fact that the book is based on the few weeks between his father being diagnosed to be suffering terminal cancer to his death, it is in many ways not a light subject, but everywhere there is a glimmer of humour. For anyone like me, who has lost one or both parents i! t underlines that feeling you have that you have from time to time , in good and bad times , that you would like to be able to have a short chat with the old man... but now it's too late.