Full name: The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir

Author: Nick Flynn Year: 2009 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Memoirs, Poetry Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780393338867 9780393068160 039333886X 0393068161

In 2007, during the months before Nick Flynn's daughter's birth, his growing outrage and obsession with torture, exacerbated by the Abu Ghraib photographs, led him to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men depicted in those photos. Haunted by a history of addiction, a relationship with his unsteady father, and a longing to connect with his mother who committed suicide, Flynn artfully interweaves in this memoir passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, and his growing obsession--a questioning of terror, torture, and the political crimes we can neither see nor understand in post-9/11 American life. The time bomb of the title becomes an unlikely metaphor and vehicle for exploring the fears and joys of becoming a father. Here is a memoir of profound self-discovery--of being lost and found, of painful family memories and losses, of the need to run from love, and of the ability to embrace it again. Similar books: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T. Kira Madden The Only Girl in the Car by Kathy Dobie Fat Girl by Judith Moore A Match to the Heart by Gretel Ehrlich Sky of Stone by Homer Hickam What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas This Lovely Life by Vicki Forman The Stardust Lounge by Deborah Digges Townie by Andre Dubus The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch Slow Love by Dominique Browning Born with Teeth by Kate Mulgrew Borrowed Finery by Paula Fox Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel No One Tells You This by Glynnis MacNicol Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty The Best Day the Worst Day by Donald Hall The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson