Furthering My Education

by William Corbett

On a Thursday morning in 1965, Dr. William Corbett tacked a note to his office door: I have gone to further my education. Neither his patients nor his family ever saw him again. Cut off from all contact with his father, his son is forced to piece together a composite sketch of his absent parent's life. Over the years he traces his father's peripatetic movement across the globe; what he cannot do is locate him in any geography of the heart. For over thirty years, themes of transience and loss have occupied poet and essayist William Corbett. Nowhere in his work do they find fuller, more direct expression than they do here. In Furthering My Education, William Corbett has written a compelling memoir of his painful relationship with his father, a man who sought to control his family and his fate through fortune hunting, artifice and intimidation. This powerful memoir of an American family goes to the heart of parent-child relationships and the bankruptcy of trust.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0944072747
• ISBN13: 9780944072745
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Zoland Books
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

The book takes after the poet

The way part II of the book starts long after half of the book, seemed like poetry. Used to books slotted with about same number of pages in a chapter, I liked the spontaniety of the book. As is this unequillibrium... so is the distribution of events in Corbett's as well as his father's life. This book can be read in one sitting. I did not pay much attention to the blackened, missing figure of the father on the front page until the story took that turn. We get to know him as an adolescent as well as a successful person later in life. It is interesting to watch the roles of Corbett as a hurting son and a father. I found it appealing that corbett wrote of his struggle to get this book published.. others might feel it best skipped. The best thing about this memoir.. is its not towards any goal.. but finds meaning by the time it gets wound.

excellent book in great condition

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Just a month or so ago I heard Wm. Corbett give a lecture at the Morgan Library in N.Y. City,, wish I had had the book before I met him!