Faith, Interrupted by Eric Lax

Well, the faith didn't get interrupted until well into the book, like over two-thirds of the way through it.

Eric's father was a beloved man, an Episcopal priest in El Cajon, California, where the author grew up. Eric was an only child. I found the book a bit pedantic, a bit boring actually. I think the author is/was bothered by the diminishment of his faith, but I also felt he just liked to talk.

He becomes eligible for the draft (Vietnam era) and goes to Micronesia as a Peace Corps volunteer and then works hard at obtaining conscientious objector status. He does eventually get that, but a good friend of his ends up in the thick of the horror of Vietnam, killing Vietcong on patrols and doing an extraordinary job keeping his platoon safe. The author writes quite a bit about this dichotomy: his own safety in the US and of his friend in peril in the killing fields of Vietnam. That could be a separate book as it is really a different story. Do many conscientious objectors feel the need to justify and explain their choices?

And then, after the war, and after his father dies, he starts to lose his faith. Faith, Interrupted? that implies a reconnection, doesn't it?

I did enjoy the first half of the book as he describes his childhood with his kind and intelligent father. The first 20 years of his life was not so very different from mine, as we were both children of men who chose the religious life as their vocation. He is also nearly the same age as I am, so the summer camps, the church services, his college experience, the devout and devoted parents and a father who liked to laugh and never took himself too seriously were very familiar to me.

Eric Lax has written other books that sound interesting: Life and Death on 10 West, which is about bone-marrow transplantation or The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat, about the development of penicillin. He has also written about Woody Allen. He writes well, so I might seek out one of these and not dismiss this author on the basis of Faith, Interrupted, which was just OK, IMO.