Reading this short memoir, one can't help rooting for the troubled son as he strains to reconcile with his ornery and aloof father. When the air-conditioning fails, Bob is "like one of those fossils in an old-age home, b-tching that bingo night is mismanaged." In Italy, the author begs his father to slow down and see the sights Bob responds by asking if his son remembers the time he read a book while the family drove through the Rockies. But from the outset, Bob proves to be a difficult traveling companion, and the author's frustration quickly becomes the reader's. Apparently, those years at sea were some of the 65-year-old's best, and the younger Steinberg, then 37, hoped to help him recapture that heady time (Bob wanted to write his memoirs) and also strengthen their own relationship.
In 1999, Steinberg, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, decided that he and his father, Bob, a retired NASA physicist, would spend three months together aboard a merchant marine training ship, just like the one on which Bob worked as a radio operator almost 50 years before.
0 kommentar(er)
