Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir...of Sorts

""When I firstdiscovered the grainy picture in my mother's desk-me as a towheaded two yearold sitting in what I remember was a salmon-orange-stained lifeboat-I wasoverwhelmed by the feeling that the boy in the boat was not waving and laughingat the person snapping the photo as much as he was frantically trying to getthe attention of the man I am today. The boy was beckoning me to join him on avoyage through the harrowing straits of memory. He was gambling that if wesurvived the passage, we might discover an ocean where the past would becomethe wind at our back rather than a driving gale to the nose of our boat. Thisbook is the record of that voyage.""" "Whenhe was sixteen years old, Ian Morgan Cron was told about his father'sclandestine work with the CIA. Thisastonishing revelation, coupled with his father's dark struggles with chronicalcoholism and depression, upended the world of a boy struggling to become aman. Decades later, as he faces his ownpersonal demons, Ian realizes the only way to find peace is to voyage backthrough a painful childhood marked by extremes-privilege and poverty, violenceand tenderness, truth and deceit-that he's spent years trying to escape. Inthis surprisingly funny and forgiving memoir, Ian reminds us that no matter howdifferent the pieces may be, in the end we are all cut from the same cloth, stitched by faith into an exquisite quilt of grace.