The Way Home
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Growing up in Bavaria during World War II, Ernestine Bradley came to know wartime dislocations and food shortages, along with the challenges of taking care of her siblings while her mother was ill. The men of her hometown were away at war, but their absence created an exciting unexpected freedom–a freedom she sought again at 21 when she became a stewardess, moved to New York and went on to marry a shy basketball star who played for the New York Knicks.
Yet the paradoxes of her childhood shaped Bradley’s life. Her hard-won discipline helped her maintain a full-time career as a professor while she commuted weekly to Washington and her husband’s public life; and Germany’s literary response to the holocaust of which she had been unaware became her scholarly passion. Cancer confronted her with a personal war, ultimately demanding a vulnerability she had never allowed herself. Frank, warm, and deeply moving, The Way Home is an inspiring American story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Memories, to me, are like illuminated islands floating in an ocean of darkness," begins Bradley's memoir. Wife of Bill Bradley, the former senator and candidate for the 2000 presidential election, Ernestine Bradley recounts her rocky childhood in Germany during and after WWII and her move to the U.S. as an adult. Bradley's recollections of her childhood and adolescence in Germany provide an insightful portrait of a family in flux during the Nazi regime, but the flow of emotion is often interrupted by unnecessary parenthetical comments and uncertainty (e.g., "This I don't remember, but it makes sense"). Bradley's parents' intense and at times unconventional relationship is a focal point of the author's childhood confusion and adolescent resentment, and inspires heartfelt descriptions. Her strength is apparent as she describes her flight from the confines of her family appropriately enough as an airline flight attendant and her subsequent challenges as a wife, mother, academic (in the field of comparative literature) and breast cancer survivor. Her descriptions of her later life are short but accurately relay the difficulties she dealt with as a woman balancing a career and a family during the 1960s and '70s. While at times stiff and defensive, Bradley's memoir is a fine portrait of a childhood spent in wartime and an adult's search for true identity. Illus.
