Chinua Achebe

My Dad and Me
by Larry King

Yogi Berra's dad, an immigrant from northern Italy, didn't see the point of American sports, but taught Yogi to keep his word and always be on time. Mario Cuomo's father seemed diminutive ("Maybe he was five foot six if his heels were not worn"), but he once led Mario and his brother in a herculean, nearly impossible effort to hoist and replant a downed 40-foot-tall blue spruce. C. Everett Koop's dad imparted to his son the crucial difference between buying something and affording something. And from her famous father, Danny, Marlo Thomas learned the wisdom of forgiveness when he told her, "I do not hunch my back with yesterday."

For My Dad and Me, Larry King asked more than 120 celebrated and successful people about their favorite memories of their fathers. Their recollections are rich with life lessons, large and small: Some are truly insightful and wise, some are hilarious, some are pragmatic, but each is a genuine reflection of the priceless gift of fatherhood. It's one thing, after all, to be told about such virtues as honesty and integrity, hard work and perseverance, gentleness and strength. It's quite another to see them living, or even sometimes faltering, within someone you love.

As warm and funny, reassuring and surprising as dads themselves, My Dad and Me not only celebrates fatherhood but also offers some candid glimpses behind the public images of well-known men and women from Donald Trump and President George H.W. Bush to Patricia Heaton and Bill Gates.

Larry King presents a moving and revealing collection of inspirational stories about fathers — and the life lessons they teach — from a host of famous men and women, including:

Chinua Achebe, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Helen Gurley Brown, President George H. W. Bush, Bob Costas, Alan Dershowitz, Phyllis Diller, Hugh Downs, Bill Gates, Ira Glass, Derek Jeter, Randy Johnson, Don Mattingly, Kevin Nealon, Kurt Russell, Bob Saget, Ryan Seacrest, Marlo Thomas, Alex Trebek, Donald Trump, Al Yankovic, And many more . . .

A prolific novelist, an editor, and an educator, Chinua Achebe has won countless awards for his vital contributions to African and English literature. His novel Things Fall Apart has sold more than 10 million copies all over the world and is considered by many one of the hundred greatest novels ever written. He is currently a professor of languages and literature at Bard College.

My father was born in the 1880s when English missionaries were first arriving among his Igbo people. He was an early convert and a good student, and by 1904 was deemed to have received enough education to be employed as a teacher and an evangelist in the Anglican Mission.

The missionaries' rhetoric of change and newness resonated so deeply with my father that he called his first son Frank Okwuofu (New Word). The world had been tough on my father. His mother had died in her second childbirth, and his father, Achebe, a refugee from a bitter civil war in his original hometown, did not long survive his wife. My father therefore was not raised by his parents (neither of whom he remembered) but by his maternal uncle, Udoh. It was this man, as fate would have it, who received in his compound the first party of missionaries in his town. The story is told of how Udoh, a very generous and tolerant man, it seemed, finally asked his visitors to move to a public playground on account of their singing, which he considered too dismal for a living man's compound. But he did not discourage his young nephew from associating with the singers.

The relationship between my father and his old uncle was instructive to me. There was something deep and mystical about it, judging from the reverence I saw and felt in my father's voice and demeanor whenever he spoke about his uncle. One day in his last years he told me a strange dream he had recently had. His uncle, like a traveler from afar, had broken a long journey for a brief moment to inquire how things were and to admire his nephew's "modern" house of whitewashed mud walls and corrugated iron roof.

My father was a man of few words, and I have always regretted that I did not ask him more questions. But I realize also that he took pains to tell me what he thought I needed to know. He told me, for instance, in a rather oblique way of his one tentative attempt long ago to convert his uncle. It must have been in my father's youthful, heady, proselytizing days! His uncle said no, and pointed to the awesome row of insignia of his three titles. "What shall I do to these?" he asked my father. It was an awesome question. What do I do to who I am? What do I do to history?

An orphan child born into adversity, heir to commotions, barbarities, and rampant upheavals of a continent in disarray — was it at all surprising that my father would eagerly welcome the explanation and remedy proffered by diviners and interpreters of a new word?

And his uncle, a leader in his community, a moral, open-minded man, a prosperous man who had prepared such a great feast when he took the OZO title that his people gave him a praise-name for it — was he to throw all that away because some strangers from afar had said so?

Those two — my father and his uncle — formulated the dialectic that I inherited. Udoh stood fast in what he knew but he also left room for his nephew to seek other answers. The answer my father found in the Christian faith solved many problems, but by no means all.

His great gift to me was his love of education and his recognition that whether we look at one human family or we look at human society in general, growth can come only incrementally, and every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.

From where I stand now, I can see the enormous value of my great-uncle, Udoh Osinyi, and his example of fidelity. I also salute my father, Isaiah Achebe, for the thirty-five years he served as a Christian evangelist and for all the benefits his work, and the work of others like him, brought to our people. I am a prime beneficiary of the education that the missionaries made a major component of their enterprise. My father had a lot of praise for the missionaries and their message, and so do I. But I have also learned a little more skepticism about them than my father had any need for. Does it matter, I ask myself, that centuries before European Christians sailed down to us in ships to deliver the Gospel and save us from darkness, other European Christians, also sailing in ships, delivered us to the transatlantic slave trade and unleashed darkness in our world? Just a thought.

Patch Adams, M.D.

In 1972, Dr. Patch Adams founded the Gesundheit! Institute, an organization based on promoting available and compassionate health care throughout America and the world. A physician, a social activist, a performer, and an author, he was the subject of a feature film starring Robin Williams in 1998.

My father died when I was sixteen as a result of war. He was a professional soldier who fought during World War II and Korea. Before he died of body, he died in his soul and heart to me, his second of two sons. My father met my mom in New York City for a weekend furlough in the fall of 1944, and I was born on May 28, 1945. He first saw me long after I was born. Half of the sixteen years we had together, he was away being a soldier, an officer.

Copyright © 2006 by Larry King. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

The author of 11 books, Larry King is the Emmy-winning host of Larry King Live! on CNN. He has received numerous broadcast and journalism awards, including the George Foster Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting. He lives in Washington, D.C.