Telling Time

Description

As a college president, Thomas Westerly, 72, was a paragon of virtue, a crusader for everything from civil rights to ecology. Now, as he lies dying surrounded by his children, he asks them to go through his papers and destroy anything deemed embarrassing. The children are stunned by the request. But as they leaf through his diaries and records, they discover scandals, neuroses and deviance, leaving them to ask just how well we know the people that we love...

Austin M. Wright was born in New York in 1922. He was a novelist and academic. He lived with his wife and daughters in Cincinnati, and died in 2003 at the age of eighty.

"Always in control, despite the proliferating points of view he manipulates, Wright (After Gregory) has assembled an intricate mosaic of a novel. . . . Wright packs this novel with dazzling formal gambits, including letters to God, do-lists and university memos. In the process, he not only creates a detailed portrait of a family but also raises profound questions about how a life is to be measured." --Publishers Weekly "A wonderfully multiple portrait of personal history and family relations. Highly recommended." --Library Journal