Sublime

The Paper Millionaire, by some Arab-turned-Englishman named Roger Shashoua. He sat

He pulls an assessment paper out of his back pocket. There are a dozen or so categories students are to be judged on. Beside each, there is a box to check: Satisfactory, Less Than Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory. There is no Good. In this business, it’s survive or not. Thrive is not an option.

His grandfather was a Scottish immigrant who made his drinking money by boxing in bars. The Scotsman trained his son, Walter’s dad, to slip jabs and throw mean right hooks, hoping the boy would one day fight for a real title. But Walter’s dad was an asthmatic and, instead of going the distance, he ended up repairing refrigerators for a living.

Doug spent even more time writing faxes to his two grown kids—Angie, nineteen, and Jaime, twenty-seven—whom he’d raised as a single father.

Father grinned and winked at his visitor. Joe Kane decided that the man who confronted him was mildly insane but harmless.

The death of Wolfe’s father in 1922, when Tom was earning his Master of Arts degree at Harvard, so traumatized the author that it took hundreds of pages in graphic detail before he wrote it out of his system.

“My mom warns and warns; it’s like she ‘cries wolf.’ My dad gives us one warning, and then he becomes the wolf.”