Dadland

Starred review from October 31, 2016
A woman revisits her faltering father’s exploits in World War II, and a marriage that felt almost as violent as the war, in this energetic memoir. Carew’s father, Tom, a British special operations officer, won medals for leading French partisans against the Germans and Burmese guerillas against the Japanese; he later became embroiled in Burmese nationalist politics, sympathizing with the anti-colonial cause against Britain’s fraying imperial claims. Carew’s vivid narrative takes readers briskly through the horrors and excitement of war, portraying Tom as a vigorous, charismatic soldier fully in his element. His postwar life is less dashing: spottily employed and debt-ridden, he struggled to provide his family with the trappings of gentility. His first wife, Jane, born into money, grew distraught at her downward mobility; she filled the house with her furious tirades and took out her rage on her live-in father-in-law by smashing his belongings, snipping his TV aerial, and throwing bricks through his bedroom window. (The author’s stepmother, a controlling woman reminiscent of Darth Vader, comes off even worse than Jane.) Carew’s evocative blend of biography and memoir maintains a warmly clear-eyed tone while taking the full measure of dysfunctional and disappointed lives. Even the scenes of Tom succumbing to Alzheimer’s have a dotty charm. This is a scintillating portrait of Britain’s Greatest Generation at war and uneasy peace. Photos.

December 15, 2016
As Thomas Carew lost his memory to dementia, his daughter embarked on a search to find a man she hardly knew. Throughout her childhood, Carew reveals in her captivating debut memoir, her father was a man who could fix anything and solve any problem. Energetic, ingenious, and charming, he was also unconventional (cheering her occasional truancy from school, for example) and no stickler for decorum or rules. She knew he had been a spy, but until she began to assemble the pieces of his life, she had little idea what that meant. In fact, during World War II, he had been a member of the Jedburghs, an elite international corps that parachuted into France to aid the resistance fighters and into Burma to hold back the Japanese. "I was one of the first good terrorists," Tom later told an interviewer. In charge of "ambushes, explosives, and small-arms instructions," he engaged in missions that were chaotic and frighteningly dangerous. But among Jedburghs and other guerrilla fighters, and when leading his team into Japanese-occupied Burma, he claimed to feel more alive than he ever would feel again. Burma proved much more challenging than France. "To start with," writes the author, "it would be impossible for the Jeds to blend in; and even if they kept themselves hidden, their great big footprints would give them away." Carew recounts the Jedburghs' role in Burmese political upheaval, smoothly weaving that narrative into her family's unsettled history. Her mother was the second of Tom's wives, an unstable, unhappy woman who railed against marriage to a man who seemed destined for financial ruin. Carew's childhood was "curdled with anger...I don't remember anything but discord." After Tom left the military, he suffered repeated business failures that left his wife and children vulnerable. The couple eventually divorced, and Tom remarried. Carew is as vicious in her portrayal of this possessive, controlling stepmother as she is empathetic to her father's loss of his adventuresome past and, more tragically, sense of identity. A tender evocation of an extraordinary life.

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December 1, 2016
During WWII, Tom Carew was a Jedburgh: highly skilled military personnel used to coordinate and train guerilla forces. As a Jed, Tom parachuted behind enemy lines in France and Burma to fight the Germans and the Japanese, respectively. After escorting her aging father to a Jedburghs' reunion, author Keggie Carew starts to piece together the history of the man she has admired her whole life. Although much of the book details war exploits, Keggie also shows the difficulties her father had after the war, trying to live a normal life. Snippets of Tom now, in his late eighties, suffering from dementia, and constantly looking for a job to make him feel useful, are heartbreaking. He seems a character out of fiction, and Keggie tells his story and its revelations beautifully. The rest of the family loses out to DadKeggie's siblings are rarely mentioned in any detailbut this is Dadland, where Keggie orbits the world of her father, and that's what you get. Fans of history and memoir will enjoy this moving and compelling book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)