-Bruce Feiler, The Council of Dads, page 170
The Council of Dads by Bruce Feiler
This is one of the best books I've read in some time. I snagged this from the Reader's Choice area at the library and I am so glad I did! I devoured it in a day (I can typically measure how good a book is by how long it takes to read) and could start again right now! The number of Amazon reviews (44) tells me that not nearly enough people have heard about this book, so let me do my part: this is a great read. A thoughtful read by a remarkable author (if all sentences were written as well as his, reading would always be more pleasant than eating, I think).Bruce Feiler and his wife, Linda, have twin two-year-old daughters (Eden and Tybee - such beautiful names) when Bruce is diagnosed with cancer. Bruce has osteosarcoma, a disease than fewer than 100 adults in the US get a year. This book covers the time frame of what he terms "The Lost Year": his year of treatments and surgery and war with cancer. He includes letters he writes to friends and family every 6-8 weeks, which are gorgeously if not painstakingly written and thought-provoking and he includes a narrative about the project that earned the book its name: The Council of Dads.
A few days after his diagnosis, and because he has been worrying about his daughters and the possibility that he may not be around to teach them, Bruce comes up with the idea of forming a group of men that could be his "voice" for his daughters if cancer did take his life. He and his wife brainstorm together to form a list of six men that each know and represent a distinct part of him and then he meets with each of them personally and reads them a letter he's written, asking them "Will you be my voice?"
As you can imagine, each person he asks is deeply touched and emotional about the situation. Some of them have been friends for more than 20 years, others for a much shorter time but very deeply. Between the letters that he writes to family and friends, Bruce writes in depth about his encounters with each of these men he loves and respects and the specific lesson that he would like them to teach his girls if he can't. In the end, he has six lessons that he summarizes as:
Approach the cow
Pack your flip-flops
Don't see the wall
Tend your tadpoles
Live the questions
Harvest miracles
The last chapter is the letter for his daughters, that brought me to tears when he ended with:
"Take trips, girls. Take chances. Take off."
The book didn't feel contrived or superficial to me, at all. Perhaps it is because people near me are struggling with cancer right now, but I felt like his battle was real, his feelings genuine and his words sincere. I felt privileged to be included in his life for a few hundred pages, and grateful for the lessons I gathered while reading.
"I believe the best teacher is beauty. I'll teach them to memorize Auden poems and Shakespeare sonnets so that wherever they are at any given moment in the world, they can just sit under a tree and have Auden or Shakespeare of whomever as their companion for an afternoon.. I'll give them the sound of Mahler symphonies that they can hear again and again and that will always trigger similar emotions. I'll show them how to appreciate Chinese calligraphy, which is an expression of your internal energy.
"What I want them to know, is how easy it is to see beauty. How the wonder they felt on that plane never has to leave them. Miracles are all around them. They just have to learn to see through the clouds, and go out and harvest those miracles themselves."
-page 195
Oh, and because I respect you, this one had a couple (5 or less) instances of the "f" word.
No comments:
Post a Comment