summer of deliverance by christopher dickey

Currently Newsweek’s Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor, he trekked through the mountain forests of Nicaragua with Contra rebels in the 1980s and traveled to Libya when it was bombed by the United States in 1986. Photo by Damien Donck/ NewsweekĬhristopher Dickey, son of the late poet and novelist James Dickey, says he couldn’t have written the 1998 memoir about his relationship with his larger-than-life dad “until I had reached a point in my career where people didn’t ask if he was my father, where it didn’t even occur to them we were related.”ĭickey (COM’74) is long past that point. His father would be proud.Twitter Facebook Christopher Dickey, Newsweek’s Paris bureau chief, is an expert on terrorism, counterterrorism, and insurgencies. Noted for his journalism, particularly covering Central America's gruesome civil wars of the 1980s, Christopher Dickey proves that he can plumb the intricacies of the human heart as incisively as the horrors of military conflict. Good though those chapters are, it's the author's unflinchingly honest yet compassionate portrait of his father that stands out.

They reconciled in 1994 this book began as their mutual project to describe the making of the Hollywood film version of Deliverance.

The drinking got worse, the affairs more flagrant, the writing sloppier, and after Christopher's mother died in 1976, father and son seldom spoke. His son's book is, among other things, a cautionary tale about the temptations of fame and money: Dickey's bestselling novel Deliverance (1970) pushed the poet to a level of commercial success he was ill equipped to deal with. Arrogant, alcoholic, unfaithful to his wife, and manipulative with his children (he boasted of Christopher, 'I made his head'), James Dickey emerges here as an all-too-human figure whose weaknesses are partially redeemed by his fierce passion for his art and by a late-life attempt to make amends for years of careless, destructive acts. Given the amount of emotional injury poet James Dickey (1923-1997) inflicted on himself and his family, it's a remarkable achievement that in this surprisingly tender memoir, Christopher Dickey not only discovers new love for his father but imparts it to readers as well.

Summer of deliverance by christopher dickey