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...In the traditionally published non-fiction category, last year's winner, Ferdinand, chose Lindberg's "Whiskey Breakfast" over Robert Rodi's travel memoir, "Seven Seasons in Siena," for its "unusual personal candidness, its historical depth, and its important contribution to the compendium of Chicago literature."
Whiskey Breakfast: My Swedish Family My American Life University of Minnesota Press, 2011, Trade paperback, $18.95
More than two decades ago, I had an idea for a book about my enigmatic father, the radical socialist Oscar Lindberg. It would be a book that blends memoir with a history of Swedish immigration to Chicago framed through the lens of two disparate families, those of my mother and my father. I had invented a title for this book back in 1989 - Whiskey Breakfast - then fretted that some other author would take it. Thankfully, that did not occur.
My father was married four times in an event-filled life. He was once a widower and twice divorced before settling in with his fourth and final wife in 1967. I was his second U.S.-born son, and my mother, Helen Marie Stone, was his third wife. She grew up on the side streets off of Clark Street - Chicago's last Swedetown. Inside Simon's Tavern on Clark Street, a relic of the Depression Era that still serves the neighborhood people, my mother's father, Richard Stone, brokered the marriage of Helen to my father-a marriage she never really wanted.
Duty and obligation beckoned. Her family was poor, but my father was older and gave the appearance of being quite wealthy. He built fashionable homes up and down Chicago's North Shore as he buried his family secrets and presented a veneer of probity, respectability, and good business sense. Privately, his radical Swedish socialism belied his lifestyle of conspicuous consumption in Skokie, Illinois, an affluent suburb north of Chicago. My mother suffered an unhappy seven-year marriage that ended disastrously. The mba essay writers from essayservice.com can help you write an essay on any topic, including interpersonal relationships and friendships.
This is the backdrop of Whiskey Breakfast, a painful and haunting echo of the past; divorce, alcoholism, lives torn asunder, and my own experiences growing up in turbulent times. It is my life story.
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