Air Traffic
A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: an extraordinary memoir and blistering meditation on fatherhood, race, addiction, and ambition.
Gregory Pardlo's father was a brilliant and charismatic man--a leading labor organizer who presided over a happy suburban family of four. But when he loses his job following the famous air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, he succumbs to addiction and exhausts the family's money on more and more ostentatious whims. In the face of this troubling model and disillusioned presence in the household, young Gregory rebels. Struggling to distinguish himself on his own terms, he hustles off to Marine Corps boot camp. He moves across the world, returning to the United States only to take a job as a manager-cum-barfly at his family's jazz club.
Air Traffic follows Gregory as he builds a life that honors his history without allowing it to define his future. Slowly, he embraces the challenges of being a poet, a son, and a father as he enters recovery for alcoholism and tends to his family. In this memoir, written in lyrical and sparkling prose, Gregory tries to free himself from the overwhelming expectations of race and class, and from the tempting yet ruinous legacy of American masculinity.
Air Traffic is a richly realized, deeply felt ode to one man's remarkable father, to fatherhood, and to the frustrating yet redemptive ties of family. It is also a scrupulous, searing examination of how manhood can be fashioned in our cultural landscape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pardlo's boisterous and affectionate memoir tells of a life of alienation, self-destructive behavior, and the search for self. Pardlo (Digest), a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, and was 13 when his father lost his job in the 1981 air controllers' strike. The adolescent Pardlo often engaged in a fierce competition with his father, egged on by his father's arrogance and pride, that lasted until his father's death in 2015. Pardlo was a mediocre high school student, and after he graduated he escaped his father by joining the Marine Corps. The next step of his rebellion happened when he met a Danish woman named Maya, who became his first wife; they moved to Copenhagen, where he enrolled in the University of Copenhagen, dropped out, moved back the New Jersey, became a bar manager, and began drinking. Eventually, he finished college and met and married a woman named Ginger, and they became parents; it was then that Pardlo began to contemplate the stresses and challenges that his own father must have faced raising him. Pardlo's memoir powerfully illustrates one man's attempt to reconcile the ways that family dynamics influence and infiltrate people's lives.
