King of the Rocks
A Memoir
by
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McMullen's right. This is it, my chance to put it all together: the puzzles of my father's life and my family's life. The solution to these have eluded me for years, despite the analyses, the memories, the hand-written letters, the photographs. I am finally ready for this task. Diving too deeply into the past feels convoluted and dangerous. Who knows where this journey will end.
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About the Book
Bill Green’s father died suddenly when he was in Belfast. Spring was coming on, and Ireland was turning into its fabled green. When he returned for the funeral, he landed at JFK airport on his way home to Pittsburgh. Oddly, while on the concourse, he felt like he was floating. Green felt a deep sense of euphoria. Why did he take pleasure—for even a moment—in his father’s death? In his mind, he had committed a grave and unforgiveable sin. Who was this man, his father? Green believed that perhaps knowing more would relieve his unending sense of grief. King of the Rocks is a book about searching the past; it is about psychoanalysis and dreams and about finding clues in a cache of old photos and letters. It is about baseball, exotic travel, polio, absence and drink, and the dense granitic silence of men.
About the Author
Bill Green is a geochemist and professor emeritus at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is married to Wanda Green and has two adult children, Dana and Katy. He is also the author of Water, Ice, and Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes; Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science; and Improbable Eden. He has published many scientific articles on the biogeochemical processes in the pristine lakes and meltwater streams of the McMurdo Dry Valleys.