The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son [Kindle Edition] Author: Pat Conroy | Language: English | ISBN:
B00CNQ7MJG | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son Epub Download
Download The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son Epub Download from with Mediafire Link Download Link In this powerful and intimate memoir, the beloved bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and his father, the inspiration for The Great Santini, find some common ground at long last.
Pat Conroy’s father, Donald Patrick Conroy, was a towering figure in his son’s life. The Marine Corps fighter pilot was often brutal, cruel, and violent; as Pat says, “I hated my father long before I knew there was an English word for ‘hate.’” As the oldest of seven children who were dragged from military base to military base across the South, Pat bore witness to the toll his father’s behavior took on his siblings, and especially on his mother, Peg. She was Pat’s lifeline to a better world—that of books and culture. But eventually, despite repeated confrontations with his father, Pat managed to claw his way toward a life he could have only imagined as a child.
Pat’s great success as a writer has always been intimately linked with the exploration of his family history. While the publication of The Great Santini brought Pat much acclaim, the rift it caused with his father brought even more attention. Their long-simmering conflict burst into the open, fracturing an already battered family. But as Pat tenderly chronicles here, even the oldest of wounds can heal. In the final years of Don Conroy’s life, he and his son reached a rapprochement of sorts. Quite unexpectedly, the Santini who had freely doled out physical abuse to his wife and children refocused his ire on those who had turned on Pat over the years. He defended his son’s honor.
The Death of Santini is at once a heart-wrenching account of personal and family struggle and a poignant lesson in how the ties of blood can both strangle and offer succor. It is an act of reckoning, an exorcism of demons, but one whose ultimate conclusion is that love can soften even the meanest of men, lending significance to one of the most-often quoted lines from Pat’s bestselling novel The Prince of Tides: “In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.” Books with free ebook downloads available The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son Epub Download
- File Size: 5157 KB
- Print Length: 352 pages
- Publisher: Nan A. Talese (October 29, 2013)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00CNQ7MJG
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,520 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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What a bonus! Pat Conroy is my favorite author and I have tickets to see him in November at the Free Library of Philadelphia. So I couldn't have been more pleased to see his latest memoir, The Death of Santini, offered through Amazon Vine. Very few authors have the opportunity to rewrite the endings to their novels, so The Death of Santini is a special book, indeed. As always, The Death of Santini is sad, funny, moving, tragic and beautifully written.
Pat Conroy grew up the oldest of seven children. His father was an Irish-Catholic from Chicago, and a fighter pilot in the Marines. His mother came from a poor, southern family but had a love of literature that she passed on to her children. Their marriage was toxic, "composed of terror and great violence, storm-tossed and seasoned with all the terrible salts of pain." For years, Colonel Don Conroy waged war against his family. The wounded child grew into a scarred man, and those scars damaged every relationship the author touched. But all that would change with the publishing of his novel, The Great Santini in 1976. The Great Santini was a fictionalized version of Conroy's father, and most of the hurtful family scenes were true to life. At first, The Great Santini caused great controversy among the Conroy family. The Colonel claimed it was all a lie. But with the divorce of Conroy's parents and his father moving nearby, the book helped to open a dialogue between the two. "There was something in my father that the book touched, and it opened up a place in his heart that I thought had closed off long before I was born. So we began a journey together, set off on a voyage that would take us to many places and shared experiences that I never thought were possible with such an incomprehensible man.
The first Pat Conroy book I read was The Great Santini: A Novel-- after I saw the excellent movie. I was captivated by his writing style-- his southern sense of drama and the beautiful way he described his fictionalized, yet obviously dysfunctional family situation. I went on to read every subsequent book. His characters would fit right into a Tennessee Williams play or a Truman Capote story. That said, I never read anything about his life.
Another great southern writer, Harper Lee, described Boo Radley's horrible life in To Kill a Mockingbird by writing that Atticus Finch said you didn't know a person until you walked around in his shoes. "Just standing on Boo Radley's porch was enough," she wrote. That's how I feel about Pat Conroy: his books are written with such heart-aching beauty and torment that I never felt the need to find the person behind them. Just reading his books was enough.
But I am very glad that I read The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son. Learning about Conroy's father and the relationship they forged despite-- perhaps because of-- Conroy's truth-telling about the family was a fascinating read. Conroy's evocative southern style shines through the book-- while others might say they grew up in an abusive home, Conroy writes, "The Conroy children were all casualties of war, conscripts in a battle we didn't sign up for on the bloodied envelope of our birth certificates.
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