Your Father's Voice
Letters for Emmy About Life with Jeremy--and Without Him After 9/11
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
It seemed like just plain bad luck. On September 11, 2001, Jeremy Glick boarded United Flight 93 only because a fire at Newark Airport had prevented him from flying out the day before. That morning, he called his wife, Lyz, to tell her the plane had been hijacked and that he and a group of others were going to storm the cockpit, an effort that doomed Glick and his fellow passengers yet doubtless saved lives on the ground and instantly became known worldwide as a heroic moment of resistance. But Lyz wanted the couple's daughter, Emmy, only three months old when the plane crashed, to learn much more of her father's story than just the ending. Your Father's Voice narrates Lyz's struggle to come to grips with her husband's death in a series of letters from Lyz to Emmy that give a wrenching but clear-eyed account of Lyz's first years without Jeremy. The letters also portray the rebellious but charismatic star athlete who became Lyz's high school sweetheart, a national collegiate judo champion, and finally her husband. We see Lyz's medical ordeal as she tries to bring Emmy into the world, Jeremy's tender nurturing of the premature baby, and the agony of his final telephone call from the ill-fated plane.
But it is during the first frantic months after the terrorist attack---as she fends off the media and fights to get the truth about what happened on Flight 93---that Lyz realizes that she and Jeremy are still deeply connected, that his love for her and Emmy endures and teaches. Soon Lyz can write to Emmy that she believes it was destiny, not luck, that put a world-class martial artist like Jeremy on an airplane with other men and women who were also determined to fight back.
Through it all, Lyz pragmatically details the challenges of a single parent raising a daughter in the aftermath of horrific tragedy, and urges Emmy to listen for what Lyz can still hear when the wind is right: her father's voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This unflinching and emotionally powerful portrayal of Jeremy Glick's life and role as one of the passengers on United's flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pa., on 9/11, takes the form of a series of letters to the Glicks' daughter, who was three months old when Jeremy died. Out of her grief, Lyz has produced this beautiful book memorializing her husband, who became a media hero for his role in the probable attack on the hijackers. She relates their precious last words when he called from the plane and describes the ways Jeremy's unique background prepared him well for that day's terrible challenges. Jeremy was a huge and powerful man (a judo champion, too), and a tender, caring father who deeply loved his high school sweetheart and their tiny daughter. With this book, Lyz Glick gives their daughter (and readers) an honest look at the daily trials she continues to face: unwelcome media attention, repeated political tributes and group meetings with the coroner. Lyz's epistolary account will comfort others dealing with loss; by book's end, it's clear she's begun the daunting task of moving on, but never forgetting. Photos.
