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Writing to Save a Life - by John Edgar Wideman (Paperback)

 Writing to Save a Life - by  John Edgar Wideman (Paperback)
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Last Price: 13.49 USD

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<b>A major literary figure tells "a searching tale of loss, recovery, and déja vu that is part memoir and what-if speculation, part polemic and exposé" (<i>The Washington Post</i>) about two generations of one family--civil rights martyr Emmett Till and his father, Louis--shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.</b> <p/>Emmett Till took a train from his home in Chicago to visit family in Money, Mississippi; a few weeks later he returned home dead. Murdered because he was a colored boy and had, allegedly, whistled at a white woman. His mother, Mamie Till, chose to display her son's brutalized face in a glass-topped casket, "so the world can see what they did to my baby." <p/>Emmett Till's murder and his mother's refusal to allow his story to be forgotten have become American legends. But one darkly significant twist in the Till legend is rarely mentioned: Louis Till, Emmett's father, Mamie's husband, a soldier during World War II, was executed in Italy for committing rape and murder. <p/>In 1955, when he and Emmett were each only fourteen years old, Wideman saw a horrific photograph of dead Emmett's battered face. Decades later, upon discovering that Louis Till had been court-martialed and hanged, he was impelled to investigate the tragically intertwined fates of father and son. <i>Writing to Save a Life</i> is "part exploration and part meditation, a searching account of [Wideman's] attempt to learn more about the short life of Louis Till" (<i>The New York Times Book Review</i>) and shine light on the truths that have remained in darkness. <p/>Wideman, the author of the award-winning <i>Brothers and Keepers</i>, "is a master of quiet meditation...and his book is remarkable for its insight and power" (<i>SFGate</i>). An amalgam of research, memoir, and imagination, <i>Writing to Save a Life</i> is essential and "impressive" (<i>Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</i>) reading--an engaging, enlightening conversation between generations, the living and the dead, fathers and sons.

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