Lost in America: A Journey with My Father Hardcover - 2003

Media reviews

“Lost in America is at once funny and heartbreaking, terrifying and lyrical, in its vivid evocation of growing up in a long-vanished immigrant Bronx. I think it is Nuland’s most powerful and beautiful book yet.”
—Oliver Sacks, author of Uncle Tungsten

“Sherwin B. Nuland’s gift is for depicting both the splendors of vitalism and the terrors of entropy in the human. His compassionate but total portrait of his father’s suffering life evokes for me much that was my own father’s frustrations. In a way, Nuland has written a dark epilogue to Philip Roth’s Patrimony, one of the essential American books.”
—Harold Bloom, author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Lost in America is a brutally honest book about a boy, his father, and the shared world they separately inhabit. It is gripping, utterly devoid of sentimentality, and disturbing to read. Yet from the bleakness of his childhood, Sherwin Nuland has written a beautiful memoir of psychological survival and the complexities of love, an unsparing look at shame, defiance, beholdenness, and the saving grace of the American dream. It is a powerful and important book, and deeply moving.”
—Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind