Whiskey Breakfast: My Swedish Family, My American Life

Description

Whiskey Breakfast is a captivating tale of life as a first-generation baby-boomer Swedish American, caught between the customs of a land he had never been to and the desire to fit into a troubled existence, tragically scarred by alcoholism, divorce, and peer abuse. It is also a powerful portrait of Lindberg's immigrant ancestors, especially of his father, Oscar-a contractor and master builder who helped develop Chicago's post-World War II suburbs.

A lifelong Chicagoan, Richard C. Lindberg has written fifteen books dealing with city history, politics, criminal justice, sports, and ethnicity. A past president of the Society of Midland Authors and the Illinois Academy of Criminology, he has appeared on the History Channel, Biography, the Travel Channel, A&E, and the Discovery Channel.

"Richard Lindberg does not spare himself or his ancestors in this poignant and powerful memoir of his family's entry to the United States. I was reminded of the great cycle of emigrant novels by Vilhelm Moberg, the noted Swedish novelist I first read and so admired in my youth, who wrote vividly and sometimes brutally of the downtrodden classes of his forebears. Lindberg evokes the same haunted landscape of poverty and superstition from which his ancestors fled to America . . . only to suffer different demons in that new land. In the end his story is a redemptive one of endurance and survival."-Harry Mark Petrakis "Deep, introspective and somber, this is by far Lindberg's most personal book to date." -Kirkus Reviews