When the Fighting is All Over by Katie Letcher Lyle

Maxine Kumin recommends
When the Fighting Is All Over, a memoir by Katie Letcher Lyle: "Katie Letcher remet her father, a Marine Corps World War II hero, when she was eight years old. He had been gone for more than four years, and neither of them was the same when he returned. Her memoir is an appealing, sensitive, poignant, yet totally unsentimental portrait of an authoritarian parent, a man given to huge rages. The complexity of her love-hate relationship with him over his long lifetime-he lived to the age of ninety-one-is familiar, yet fresh and surprising. But the book is much more than one person's story; it critiques the American Dream and adds immensely to our sense of the history of the era." (Longstreet)