In honor of Father’s Day (June 15), Very Short List has teamed up with Publishers Weekly to present the best of VSL’s book picks that seem especially dad-appropriate.
1. In the witty and touching memoir The Film Club, Canadian film critic and novelist David Gilmour proposed the following to his teenage son: He could drop out of high school if he watched three movies a week under his tutelage. The pair watched hundreds of movie together — from Absolute Power to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — and both ended up receiving a unique education in what fathers and sons can teach each other. To buy it, click here.
2. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is the extraordinary and heartbreaking memoir from white Zimbabwean Peter Godwin. Godwin, a journalist, went back to visit his native Zimbabwe from New York and spent the next eight years frequently returning — on each visit witnessing more of his country’s downward spiral, under monstrous dictatorial rule, into poverty, famine, and violence. But it’s his relationship with his heroic, stoic parents (and the secret they’ve kept from him) that is the heart of this book. To buy it, click here.
3. Don’t want to go the memoir route? Kate Ascher’s handsome The Works: Anatomy of a City is irresistible. The book offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the intricacies of New York City’s infrastructure — how electricity flows to millions of people; how traffic patterns develop and are managed; and how gas, electricity, sewage,
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