Faith of Our Sons: A Father's Wartime Diary - Hardcover

Schaeffer, Frank

4.18

44 ratings by Goodreads

9780786713226: Faith of Our Sons: A Father's Wartime Diary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786713224 ISBN 13: 9780786713226

Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 2004

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In 1998, novelist Frank Schaeffer’s eighteen-year-old son, John, joined the marines straight out of prep school. Their ensuing journey, recounted in Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps, struck a fervent chord among the many Americans with a family member in the military, inspired personal communications from three American presidents, and propelled the book and the authors through many printings and onto Oprah, 20/20 and the New York Times extended bestseller’s list. In Faith of Our Sons, Frank Schaeffer picks up his family’s ongoing story as Corporal John Schaeffer is deployed to the Middle East on the day Gulf War II begins. Schaeffer’s powerfully moving and timely account of the universal experience of losing a child—either temporarily or permanently—to war and his attendant emotions (from pride to panic to rage and back again) is punctuated throughout by the voices of the many others in Frank’s situation, thousands of other parents and children, who continue to pour their hearts out to the Schaeffers in countless letters since the publication of Keeping Faith: from those waiting anxiously for loved ones to come home to those who know they never will.

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From Publishers Weekly:

In this follow-up to Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps (2002), which Schaeffer coauthored with his son, Corporal John Schaeffer, Frank and his wife confront the reality of their son’s deployment to Iraq in February 2003. Although the third sentence of this "Diary of Deployment" is "I’m elated for my boy because he sounds happy," the fourth is "I’m elated in the same way one is ‘elated’ by looking over a cliff." Over the ensuing months, Frank and Genie work to calm their nerves, get and share information from and with other parents, and help parents whose children are killed in battle cope with their losses—some of whose letters are included here, as are letters from John, who returns to his U.S. base safely in December. Schaeffer is unflinching in recounting day-to-day dreams, fears and coping mechanisms, and in registering his own, and others’, reactions to the politics of the war. Although most parents of soldiers don’t write Op-Eds for the Washington Post or appear on Oprah, Schaeffer is careful to try to give voice to "ordinary" parents and soldiers from all branches of the service, and that care is what makes this volume a valuable resource for other parents of military personal.
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Review:

"Dramatic and laugh-out-loud funny, beautifully written and deftly constructed, deeply affecting in its honest portrayal of the author's passions: a stunning achievement."

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