Half the Way Home - Softcover

"An exquisite memoir of a boy growing up: of a world of privilege and the one beyond. It is in coming to under- stand his powerful father that Adam Hochschild is able to under- stand both worlds." --Studs Terkel

"I loved reading Half the Way Home. It is such a gentle book, its eloquence so delicate--and at the same time very strong, dealing as it does with such an exceptionally, intensely difficult relationship." --Alice Adams

"His story is fascinating, and the portrait of a lost childhood offered here evokes one of the archetypal dreams of the American mind." --E. L. Doctorow

"I was so moved, disturbed and diverted by this beautifully plain account of the most complicated and delicate set of emotions, not just between father and son but more widely between the mystery of power and powerlessness." --Nadine Gordimer

Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, 'Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son,' was published in 1986. "By turns nostalgic and regretful, lyrical and melancholy," wrote Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, "Half the Way Home creates . . . an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love . . . conjuring them up with Proustian detail and affection." It was followed by 'The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey,' and 'The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin.' 'The Unquiet Ghost' won prizes from the Overseas Press Club of America and the Society of American Travel Writers.

Hochschild's 'Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels,' won the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. 'King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa' was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It also won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize in Great Britain and the Lionel Gelber Prize in Canada. His books have been translated into ten languages.

Besides his books, Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books and many other newspapers and magazines. He is a former commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

Hochschild was a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, and was an editor and writer there for some years. He now teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and has been a guest teacher at other campuses in the U.S. and abroad. He spent five months as a Fulbright Lecturer in India. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Arlie, the sociologist and author. They have two sons.