6/22/2023 0 Comments Gonville by Peter Birkenhead![]() ![]() As a young adult, Birkenhead reacted to his volatile childhood by forgetting its worst moments. Such is the contradictory figure at the center of this astonishingly candid and shocking memoir. An avid gun collector yet an anti-war activist, a popular economics professor and a wife-swapping nudist, a leftist and a lifelong fan of the British Empire who would occasionally don an authentic pith helmet and imitate Michael Caine’s performance as the heroic Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead in the bloody war film Zulu, he was a man who could knock his young son down the stairs one day and the next cry about putting the family’s aged dog to sleep. ![]() In powerful and spirited prose, Peter Birkenhead recounts a childhood spent trying to make sense of his father, a terrifying, charismatic presence who brutalized his family physically and emotionally at the same time that he enchanted them with his passion and whimsy. ![]()
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