{"id":1266,"date":"2012-01-15T12:25:32","date_gmt":"2012-01-15T20:25:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1266"},"modified":"2012-01-15T12:25:32","modified_gmt":"2012-01-15T20:25:32","slug":"review-my-daddy-was-a-pistol-and-im-a-son-of-a-gun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1266","title":{"rendered":"Review: My Daddy Was A Pistol And I’m A Son Of A Gun"},"content":{"rendered":"

When people hand me books, I tend to read ’em.\u00a0 My Dad handed me this one when I saw him over Christmas break.\u00a0 He’d been killing some time in a used bookstore and he liked the title.\u00a0 It’s a great title to get you to pick up a book, so I see how it drew him in; Lewis Grizzard, the author, pulled it out of a country western song for just that reason.\u00a0 My Daddy Was A Pistol And I’m A Son Of A Gun<\/em> is also a great title because it sums the book up so well.\u00a0 Grizzard’s father was larger than life, and their relation shaped him.<\/p>\n

The title is so universally appealing that it is easy to imagine that the book is about fathers and sons in general.\u00a0 It is not.\u00a0 This is about a specific father and son, a larger-than-life engaging but eventually tragic drifter and his son.<\/p>\n

Grizzard does a great job at getting all of his enormous father on to paper.\u00a0 His daddy was such a man of extremes that most people trying to think about him would have to constrain themselves to one or two aspects, to write the man into a caricature.\u00a0 Grizzard manages to give a fully realized picture without pulling a punch or failing to give credit.\u00a0 Getting something like that right in your own head is hard enough; putting explaining it to someone else on paper is much harder.<\/p>\n

He looks at his father’s influence on himself with the same clear eyes.\u00a0 Again, clearly sizing that up and presenting it honestly is a feat.<\/p>\n

All that would only be interesting to Grizzard and maybe a mental health professional except that Grizzard writes an entertaining yarn.\u00a0 This is entertaining in the best sense of that word – diverting and interesting.\u00a0 This is a great story told to keep an audience listening.\u00a0 The yarn is much more than a shaggy dog story, but its told with the rhythms that hold a listener’s interest without exhausting their patience.\u00a0 Being honest and engaging simultaneously is Grizzard’s great achievement here.<\/p>\n

Strongly Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When people hand me books, I tend to read ’em.\u00a0 My Dad handed me this one when I saw him over Christmas break.\u00a0 He’d been killing some time in a used bookstore and he liked the title.\u00a0 It’s a great title to get you to pick up a book, so I see how it drew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1266"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1270,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1266\/revisions\/1270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}