Fake Smiles - Tony Rogers releases powerful memoir of competition and affection between father and son during the turbulent sixties in Washington, DC

By: PRLog

March 10, 2017 at 13:08 PM EST

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - March 10, 2017 - PRLog -- TidePool Press is pleased to announce the publication of Fake Smiles, a graceful and timely memoir by Tony Rogers that Jeffrey Frank, former senior editor at the New Yorker, has praised as a "deeply moving account of the awkward competition and affection between father and son during an extraordinary era in America." Frank is referring to the era from Eisenhower to Nixon when Tony was coming of age and during which his father, William P. Rogers, served Eisenhower as Attorney General and Nixon as Secretary of State. An immensely decent man, the father was continually challenged by his eldest son. Tony's sterling resume of Yale College and Harvard Law School pleased his dad, but it belied a stubbornly independent spirit that resisted family pressures to conform politically and professionally.

Shy and introspective but with a compelling sense of self, Tony marched against the Vietnam War while his dad was heading the State Department, played guitar in rock and jazz bands, built ham radios, spent two summers working on farms and had no appetite to "get ahead" which was his father's constant mantra. Gradually and with great difficulty, father and son learned to accept each other. Always candid and never sparing himself, Tony Rogers – an award winning novelist and short story writer – recounts what the difficult time and that difficult relationship were like.

The famous and infamous were frequent visitors to the Rogers' household. Richard Nixon often stopped for drinks, Robert Frost came to thank Bill Rogers for his help getting Ezra Pound out of St. Elizabeth's mental hospital, and the Red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy tried to teach Tony how to box in the family living room.

The record of an unorthodox life and a hard-won father-son relationship, Fake Smiles is an uncommonly literate, personal history that reveals fresh insights into a pivotal and still influential era of contemporary American history. Walter Isaacson writes that Fake Smiles is, "a moving and very memorable tale, one that can help all of us better understand the issues of family, country and finding your way."

Fake Smiles: A Memoir

Hardcover • 224 pages ISBN 978-0-9914523-2-3

eBook ISBN: 978-0-9914523-4-7

Contact TidePool Press, LLC, for more information at www.tidepoolpress.com

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