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Title details for Son of a Gun by Justin St. Germain - Wait list

Son of a Gun

A Memoir

by Justin St. Germain
George Newbern
Audiobook
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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath
Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after.
 
Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop?
 
Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be.
 
Praise for Son of a Gun
  
“[A] spectacular memoir . . . calls to mind two others of the past decade: J. R. Moehringer’s Tender Bar and Nick Flynn’s Another Bull____ Night in Suck City. All three are about boys becoming men in a broken world. . . . [What] might have been . . . in the hands of a lesser writer, the book’s main point . . . [is] amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation. . . . If the brilliance of Son of a Gun lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author’s insights.”—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review
“[A] gritty, enthralling new memoir . . . St. Germain has created a work of austere, luminous beauty. . . . In his understated, eloquent way, St. Germain makes you feel the heat, taste the dust, see those shimmering streets. By the end of the book, you know his mother, even though you never met her. And like the author, you will mourn her forever.”—NPR
 
“If St. Germain had stopped at examining his mother’s psycho-social risk factors and how her murder affected him, this would still be a fine, moving memoir. But it’s his further probing—into the culture of guns, violence, and manhood that informed their lives in his hometown, Tombstone, Ariz.—that transforms the book, elevating the stakes from personal pain to larger, important questions of what ails our society.”—The Boston Globe
 
“A visceral, compelling portrait of [St. Germain’s] mother and the violent culture that claimed...

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 13, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780804128896
      • File size: 198095 KB
      • Duration: 06:52:41

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      December 1, 2013

      In this somber memoir, St. Germain chronicles his mother's murder at the hands of his stepfather, who shot her eight times in her shoulder and chest, then left her in a trailer in the desert. The who, what, where, and how are well known; the only mystery left is why it happened. St. Germain does not find any easy answers as he recalls his own childhood in Arizona, revisiting his memories of the mother he only partially knew. She was a woman of contradictions: she had a career as an army paratrooper but also became involved in a series of abusive relationships that damaged all the members of her small family. Her son writes with clear-eyed acknowledgment of the harm this caused him, admitting that he couldn't fully grieve at the time of her death, yet would never shake off the shadow cast over his future. Narrator George Newbern's youthful voice and the restrained emotion he conveys capture the mournful, compassionate, and self-reflective tone of the book. VERDICT Well done on all fronts; highly recommended. [One of LJ's Best Core Nonfiction titles of 2013, p. 26.--Ed.]--Victoria A. Caplinger, NoveList, Durham, NC

      Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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