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In the absense of Ed Bennett, who is in critical
care, in a hospital in Nevada, Charles P. Reis
was kind enough to share this review with our
readers and subscribers. Our prayers go out to
Ed, his wife Angie and his family.

The Fathers We Find
by Charles P. Ries.
Bad Monk
$14.99 e-book (296p)
ISBN 978-0-692-48138-7

Reviewed by BookLife

Five-time Pushcart Prize nominee Ries turns from poetry
(Girl Friend & Other Mysteries of Love) to prose in this
memoir of life in rural Wisconsin, sensitively capturing
"the mysterious pieces of a boy on the verge of becoming."
Ries combines his gift for language with an insight into
the relationships at the core of the book: "the parents
we are given, and the parents we find." He deals mostly
with his father, a devout Catholic whose world was built
on the "routines and rituals" of religion and running a
successful mink farm, and whose "silent, stoic" personality
Ries unsuccessfully tries to emulate. The memoir gives a
detailed look at the "earthy way" of growing up raising
and killing minks ("Death during pelting season was quick
and painless"). But overall the focus is on the connection
he lacks with his father but finds with other men, including
his brothers and Marvin, the hired man on the farm, "who found
his God in living, with the same passion that my father found
in church." Marvin is the exemplar of "the fathers we are given.
Men who appear in our lives and magically see our nature and
potential."

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