Reviewing: “Our Family’s Book of Acts”

A Review of my Mother’s Second Book: “Our Family’s Book of Acts: To Love and Serve the Lord”
by Frank Wynerth Summers III on Tuesday, November 20, 2012 at 1:54pm ·
The book is Our Family’s Book of Acts: To Love and to Serve the Lord and so I suggest that if you or someone you know likes books with a harried mother’s view of family dynamics this book has plenty of that. If the romance and adventure of travelogues with locales in Mexico, Colombia, New Zealand, Australia and the Philippines are more your style this could still be your book. If in seeking to understand your own life or the world you read books about birth mothers and adoption then read about my mother and my half brother Paul. If you crave stories about children born with rare diseases and syndromes read about my brother Simon. If you have any reason to support the proliferation of stories about people dying of AIDS and the troubles they face then the story of Paul ending his days in Louisiana may be worth reading and this might be a book you would like to buy. The story is plenty compelling if one surrenders to reading it — if you like to follow a family and see the many ways in which people change and yet stay the same across decades you might like this book. If you have read my blog, follow me on Twitter, read my newspaper and other published pieces in bygone years or are an attentive Facebook friend maybe you could not do much better in terms of investing in your understanding that buying and reading this book. If you read and enjoyed the first of her memoirs Go You are Sent: An Incredible Odyssey of Faith you ought to read this one as well. If you like the dark and troubled side of idealism and religious adventure there is a bit of the Mosquito Coast film’s vibe in this book as well. For those seeking to follow the spiritual path our family has struggled upon the book has a different appeal much nearer the center of the narrative.

My mother has just come out with her second book but it is a text she labored with for decades. I think it is well written and an extraordinarily difficult book to write within the context of memoirs. Among lives few lives can be harder to write witrh accuracy than mine or my mother’s lives. I hope those reading this will consider picking up a copy. It is bound to be a view of life and places you have not experienced in life or in letters as well as having some views of the more familiar parts of the time in which we who buy books have lived. I am not a disinterested observer in that the book is as much about me as it is about anyone except my my mother and father. However, it is a very complicated history and relationship with these words which leads me to this time at the keyboard. While I discuss the book I also want to discuss my relationship to it. I have my opinions and ideas out pretty well in the open in many venues although they are not so very well publicized and famous as they might be in life. This book had it come out as it has many years earlier might have made it possible for me to reach a better concord with the society in which I have been born and labored much of my life. Now it is not really relevant so much in that regard.

There are only two errors regarding my life which contradict the facts in my view although even those could be susceptible of a correct ifactual reading. That is disappointing but really my mother even with my editing a draft years ago, with her use of the internet and hiring an occasional fact checker has faced enormous obstacles in putting these events on paper. So much change, travel, struggle and correspondnce as we have known is a rare thing. The book inevitably lists some characters it does not let the reader really get to know but they are real people whether dead or alive. Much is left out for a wide variety and what is included does make for a real and readable narrative. My mother does have a perspective on divine interaction with the unioverse and with her won life that will be alien to many readers of my stuff. I would challenge you to buy and read the book and using what else you may know about my life and theories of phenomenology try to work out what you feel is the truth of the text. Let me settle for any who trust me that it is no facile fabrication.

I am glad to have the text out which makes it possible to understand a bit about my life and origins. When take with her first book it certainly provides a rubric and structure of fact and narrative. However, this is certainly my mother’s story and her book. It is not the book I would have written even had she not gotten there first. The reality itself is much beigger than its distillation into text will alllow as is true of most lives.

Things have worked out much better than they could have for me and many I love. Yet, there are many sorrows not detailed in the book too. There large parts of many lives barely suggested. The book was work not reverie and is a work of narrative in a good and high sense. I will be more likely to entertain
personal questions from those who have read the book than from those who have not read it. I have a good bit to distract me and am taking the time to write and post this Note.

This postis appearing as a Facebook Note and then will appear as a post recopied into my blog. This is the Tuesday before Thanksgiving Day. It is an odd time in some ways to begin posting a review of my mother’s second segment of her memoir. In addition, the book itself is in a state which has some strangeness as regards distribution. One store which has long handled my mother’s first book and I am pretty sure has her second as well is Crossroads Catholic Bookstore which can be reached at the contacts provided in the information below:
(337) 988-3569
4416 Johnston St,Lafayette,LA 70503

In addition the book is available at Family Missions Company which can be googled and which can be located from information on my Facebook Page. None of these people endorse this review. The book retails at $15.95, its ISBN is 978-0-615-45595-2 and is published under the tradestyle of Summerise Media. That title reminds me of when I used to put out a column under the title of a Summery of the Local Cultural Scene. The book is 386 pages. It can be considered a fairly fast read and is really important to anyone who really wants to know me for example