(My mother then retired to her room, roaring crying, and remained there for the rest of that terrible afternoon. During those hours, my grief-stricken mother seemed entirely to have forgotten my own existence. It was as if I had lost both parents, not just one. I remember sitting in the dining-room contemplating the long, shiny mahogany table, and feeling that everything that made life worth living was gone forever. That afternoon was the worst parts of my whole life to date. Conor Cruise O'Brien's moving account of his father's death on Christmas Day, 1927, shortly alter his tenth birthday. In this searching memoir. Conor Cruise O'Brien traces the forces that have shaped his life with the clarity, power, passion and tender wit that have made him a scholar, writer and intellectual of international reputation.)