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Sacrifice
A beautiful, elegiac novel of a father, a son, and the secrets that divide generations.
In the seventy-fifth year of his life, on a sweltering August afternoon, Chester Garland, the distinguished psychiatrist, author, and campaigner for human rights, is struck by a subway train and dies. Soon after, his son Paul receives a thoroughly unexpected three diaries written decades earlier, in the year when Garland, on a trip to France,unaccountably walked out on his family and his profession.
As cool, detached Paul, a cyberspace cartoonist, reads the diaries, he finally faces the event that has shadowed his life since childhood. He embarks, as his father had a quarter century earlier, on a pilgrimage of love and grief, of passions-religious, erotic, and intellectual-and of discovery that is as unexpected as it is moving.
With grace and precision, Gitlin takes us on a journey not just across an ocean or across decades, but into the secret depths of two men's lives, which were forever changed in the aftermath of that tumultuous decade now known as "the sixties." A memorable portrait of a father and son locked in a biblical embrace, Sacrifice builds with quiet elegance to its shocking conclusion.
In the seventy-fifth year of his life, on a sweltering August afternoon, Chester Garland, the distinguished psychiatrist, author, and campaigner for human rights, is struck by a subway train and dies. Soon after, his son Paul receives a thoroughly unexpected three diaries written decades earlier, in the year when Garland, on a trip to France,unaccountably walked out on his family and his profession.
As cool, detached Paul, a cyberspace cartoonist, reads the diaries, he finally faces the event that has shadowed his life since childhood. He embarks, as his father had a quarter century earlier, on a pilgrimage of love and grief, of passions-religious, erotic, and intellectual-and of discovery that is as unexpected as it is moving.
With grace and precision, Gitlin takes us on a journey not just across an ocean or across decades, but into the secret depths of two men's lives, which were forever changed in the aftermath of that tumultuous decade now known as "the sixties." A memorable portrait of a father and son locked in a biblical embrace, Sacrifice builds with quiet elegance to its shocking conclusion.
229 pages, Hardcover
First published April 8, 1999
About the author
Todd Gitlin
52 books51 followersTodd Gitlin was an American writer, sociologist, communications scholar, novelist, poet, and not very private intellectual. He was professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University.
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January 30, 2014I had to quit this book. I could not stay focused and found myself googling random thoughts. One of the least engaging books I've ever picked up.
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