Young Fred is a Jewish boy stretched between the divergent values of parents who cannot tolerate one another. Fred's father, Abe, is a brilliantly talented salesman whose relentless will drives him to succeed, whatever the cost. He marries Stella, an abstract artist, the student of De Kooning and Hans Hofmann, but also the daughter of a wealthy industrialist with whom Abe forges an alliance. When the marriage founders, Fred's world is assaulted by his mother's need to realize herself as an artist and by his father's need for revenge. In order to keep head above water while family and fortune go down around him, Fred fishes.Fred Waitzkin's moving accont of fatherhood is still imprinted on the minds of those who read the book or watched the film Searching for Bobby Fischer. Now he has written a memoir of his own childhood that unfolds with dramatic tension and luminous ironies of a great novel.
