Dadland
- Author Keggie Carew
- Narrator various
- Publisher Random House
- Publish Date 1 January 1970
- Run Time 13 hours and 18 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Coping with illness and specific health conditions, Family and health, Family history, tracing ancestors, History, Memoirs, Modern warfare, Oral history, Second World War.
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What to expect
Keggie Carew grew up in the gravitational field of an unorthodox father who lived on
his wits and dazzling charm. As his memory begins to fail, she embarks on a quest to unravel his story, and soon finds herself in a far more consuming place than she had bargained for.
Tom Carew was a maverick, a left-handed stutterer, a law unto himself. As a member of an elite SOE unit he was parachuted behind enemy lines to raise guerrilla resistance in France, then Burma, in the Second World War. But his wartime exploits are only the start of it...
Dadland is a manhunt. Keggie takes us on a spellbinding journey, in peace and war, into surprising and shady corners of history, her rackety English childhood, the poignant breakdown of her family, the corridors of dementia and beyond. As Keggie pieces Tom – and herself – back together again, she celebrates the technicolour life of an impossible, irresistible, unstoppable man.
Foreword and afterword read by the author.
Critics Review
“As Dad was losing his past… I was trying to retrieve it,” Keggie writes… With the publication of this original, moving book, she has succeeded
Compelling and moving from start to finish… Carew’s funny, fascinating and unflinching tribute to her father is a portrait of a complex man: not just a war hero but a flawed husband; not just a Jedburgh but her incorrigible and much-missed dad
a thrilling, bloody, educative history of Churchill’s Special Operations Executive… combined ingeniously with a tender, moving, funny portrait of the author’s father
A fascinating mix of military history and family memoir studded with photographs… It’s one woman’s attempt to put her father’s role in history on the page, at the same time as his own recollections of it diminish
A poignant, inspiring and often comic account of family life and the man known as the T E Lawrence of Burma … Ripping real-life yarns of double agents, secret messages, illicit assassinations and cyanide pills… the heroics and humour persist to the end
A beautifully written, funny and tender ode to an adventurous, occasionally frustrating, man who lived life at full tilt
It’s now commonplace to say that sad memoirs are ultimately redemptive, but Dadland is the real McCoy. It is a rich and stunning achievement, a feat of imagination that sews together many parallel true stories. Above all, it is a labour of shining daughterly love
I was so absorbed and moved by Dadland I haven’t been able to read anything else. It is beautifully written — deft and funny and so tender — but I have also come away knowing more about history, more about dementia, more about men, more about daughters, more about love, family, sheds, diaries, an inquisitive mind and peeing in plastic bottles. I loved it. I really did.
Powerful memoir… The clouding of Tom’s mind never eclipsed his charm … Dadland is no tragedy, threaded as it is with forgiveness, love and a fine, fierce comic glitter
Keggie turns spy on her father. She is on a “ghost hunt”… What she uncovers is an extraordinary gift for any memoirist… fascinating
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