4.4 - sad, funny, well written ( )

Memoir about growing up with alcoholic father. Many things familiar. ( )

This is a book you will not want to put down. It will make you laugh out loud and cry from beginning to end, and is a heartbreaking chronology of a family's history in an unusual town. It took a lot of guts to write this story and it has a lot to say about the gradual and insidious path that sucks people down into addiction without reprieve. It also reminds us that this path cuts a swath through everyone's lives and the fallout remains for years to come.
The author is correct in pointing out that wives could not easily escape from this destructive web as the societal, economic and family pressures were overwhelmingly against them getting out of such relationships. There really weren't any battered women's shelters in Rochester at that time, and the best one could hope for were family friends who could intervene at some level. The pressures in Rochester, at the time, to downplay these kinds of family problems was enormous. I am amazed that Mrs. Sulllivan was as proactive as she was in protecting her children. I can also understand how their family life went down the slippery slope that it did.
His brother Chris points out that they survived all this because of their mother, grandfather, educational opportunities, time and a great sense of humor and (I suspect) irony. There are many families who cannot laugh at their problems, and I think those are the families who are also most at risk for going under. I am glad this family came out the other side, but am sorry they paid such a high price to do so.
I could not put this book down. You won't be able to either. There are many books out there that discuss dysfunctional families and problems with addiction, but I found that this was incredibly well written and insightful. I was given this book by the
University of Minnesota Press. ( )

I could use many words to describe this heartfelt memoir. Words like insightful, compassionate, heartbreaking but most of all it is a memoir about a family. A family that started out like all families, actually a little above socioeconomically, as the father is a respected neurosurgeon at the Mayo clinic. It shows how insidious the effects of drugs and alcohol are on a person and the whole family structure. How easily one become enslaved and how hard it is to throw the addiction off. Six boy, one mother, so many of these stories were delightful, humorous and ones I could definitely relate to having 5 boys myself. Their mother was a remarkable woman, in the fifties few options were open for a woman alone, and with six children even less. Yet she did the best she could, actually she coped remarkably well. That her sons love her is apparent as well. This is a brave, no holds barred, but not without many incidents of humor and love, told memoir about an ordinary family that had to deal with extraordinary circumstances. ( )

At one time Luke's father was a top orthopedic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. Alcoholism turned him into a verbally abusive man, one who slowly descends into madness.

I found this book to be very repetitive. It went over the same event multiple times, merely switching from journal entries to interviews to recollections. This was a bit excessive. The information about the funeral dragged on and on. It was at the beginning of the book and them repeated almost verbatim at the end of the book. I loved the superhero passages, they felt exactly like something a little boy would daydream about. Overall, the book could use some editing. ( )