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A Father, a Son, and Unintentional Lessons in Happiness
Macmillan
May 2011
On Sale: May 10, 2011
304 pages ISBN: 0374192111 EAN: 9780374192112 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
It’s 2008. Jim Axelrod—once among the most watched
correspondents on network news and the first television
reporter to broadcast from Saddam International Airport in
2003—is covering the final stages of the race for the
Democratic presidential nomination. He’s forty-five years
old and thirty pounds overweight. He’s drinking too much,
sleeping too little, and scarcely seeing his family. He’s
just figured out that the industry that pulled him up the
corporate ladder is imploding as he’s reaching for its final
rungs. Then, out of the blue, Jim discovers his late
father’s decades-old New York Marathon finish times. At
forty-six, Bob Axelrod ran a 3:29:58. With everything else
going on in his life, Jim sets himself a defining challenge:
“Can I beat him?”
So begins a deeply felt, often hilarious, quixotic effort to
run the 2009 New York Marathon. Along the way, Jim confronts
his listing marriage, a career upset by the seismic changes
going on throughout the television news industry,
excruciatingly painful shin splints, and the worst-timed
kidney stone possible. Looming over it all is the shadow of
a loving father, who repeatedly lost his way in life but
still has a lesson to impart.
This is a book about a dead father’s challenge to a son at a
crossroads, but, more than that, it is about the personal
costs paid when ambition and talent are not enough to ensure
success. Most fundamentally, though, it is a book about
learning what it takes to be happy in your own skin.
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