MY FATHER'S BOOKS: a recollection

As part of the book clearing out I spoke of in my last blog post I reluctantly shed some of my late father's books. My dad, Saul Fox, was an avid reader. Indeed, most of the time he put my own more scattered reading habits to shame. Progressive in politics, idealistic in philosophy and eclectic in interests, he regularly took on monumental tomes, reading what seemed like a scant handful of pages on any given day yet finishing even the most demanding volume both quickly and thoughtfully.


He did not like to discard books—as he often admitted, he had a Depression mentality about such things. And so, when he died, his bookshelves held evidence of the reading of many decades. Some of the books I remember from my earliest childhood: To Kill a Mockingbird, Profiles in Courage, not one but two copies of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a book which I have attempted to read but never made it through.

From a few years later he owned A Thousand Days, The Death of a President, and a variety of other books on the Kennedys, though these were the exception to his usual save-it-forever rule; when John Kennedy's sexual exploits and role in Vietnam became public, Dad would have let those go had it not been for Mom's intercession. The Watergate years added a copy of Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men, as well as a variety of the gardening books he bought as he struggled with his first suburban yard (he was an apartment-house child) and built his own small greenhouse.

And so it went, each decade marked with its own thoughtful collection of titles. I'm sorry now that I did not make note of exactly what he was reading when he died in 2006 at the age of 81; that information would be interesting to me today, but it escaped me in the welter of emotions and tasks that follow a parent's death. I do remember that several books on the Iraq war were stacked on his "reading table" at that time, along with Haynes Johnson's The Age of Anxiety: From McCarthyism to Terrorism. I'm pleased to say that unlike The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I did make it through Johnson's book, the intelligence and searching, almost searing approach of which seem entirely consistent with Dad's preferences and personality.

Dad's books are a deeply personal, deeply soulful part of his legacy, and it wasn't easy to release any of them. But a realistic assessment of space requirements in my home prevailed, shored up in moments of deepest doubt the image of my brother correctly asserting that he did not need physical possessions to remember Dad and Mom. I let go of some twenty books, keeping those titles that seemed most characteristic of his interests and values. It occurs to me, as I write this, that an even more soulful tribute to Dad than keeping his beloved books would be to read as frequently, passionately and persistently as he did...an inspiration from him that may not be a physical legacy, but is somehow an even more meaningful one.