National Book Award Non Fiction Winner

An American Requiem

by James Carroll

Summary

A memoir of the author's rupture with his father, an Air Force lieutenant general who helped run the Vietnam-era Pentagon, as Carroll became an antiwar Catholic priest. The book interweaves family conflict with the upheavals of 1960s American Catholicism, civil rights, and the war. It reads as both intimate confession and a generational history of faith and dissent.

Historical Context & Significance

The book is a microcosm of the 1960s "generation gap," capturing the spiritual and political rupture within a single American family.