The American

A poignant, taut, and harrowing childhood memoir–a best seller in Europe–of a French-man’s dark relationship with his American father. The author’s father, Frederick Giesbert, was twenty years old when he landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy, on June 6, 1944. It was to be the defining moment of his life, “wounded to the quick at having survived.” Three years after the invasion, Frederick was living in his hometown of Chicago, married to a French girl...
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A poignant, taut, and harrowing childhood memoir–a best seller in Europe–of a French-man’s dark relationship with his American father. The author’s father, Frederick Giesbert, was twenty years old when he landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy, on June 6, 1944. It was to be the defining moment of his life, “wounded to the quick at having survived.” Three years after the invasion, Frederick was living in his hometown of Chicago, married to a French girl he’d met in Normandy. But when the seemingly happy couple returned to Normandy to make a home with their baby, Franz-Olivier, something in the father snapped, and he began habitually to batter both his wife and his child. Franz-Olivier Giesbert spent his childhood defying, ignoring, and even plotting to kill his father. But as an adult he began searching for forgiveness, “to free myself from the grief of never having given my father the chance to talk to me.” Now that search comes to a deeply moving end, in this fiercely honest and emotionally gripping memoir.