The Girl Watchers Club
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Harry Stein gives us the conversations of a group of older men who meet every week for lunch to reflect on their lives and the state of the world. What is a well-lived life? What is honour, and does it have a place in our society? A profound and poignant meditation on the meaning of honour, told through the words of men who lived life according to the forgotten rules of trust and responsibility. From these conversations, Stein shows us men who lived their lives according to values that have since been declared relative or obsolete: honour, responsibility, decency, and an uncynical commitment to being the best men they could be. Stein presents the stories of this remarkable group of men who lived through the difficult time of the mid-20th century and all its wars and social upheavals. We meet Moe Turner, Stein's father-in-law, a mathematician involved in research on the H-bomb who is Stein's connection to the group. We meet Boyd Huff, a survivor of the Nazi prisoner camps, whose youngest son was killed in a gun accident and oldest is a hospitalized schizophrenic. We meet Gene Cooper, an electrical engineer and the emotional centre of the group. These three men, and the rest of the club, have had difficult lives and plenty of trying moments, yet all of them have survived with their sense of right and wrong, of honour and love, fully intact. Stein connects their background, stories and lives, to the valuable views and ideas they share with him now. What the reader comes away with is a renewed sense of purpose, a new confidence in the strength of courage and conviction in your beliefs—even as those of the world change around you.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Stein's portrait of WWII veterans who meet weekly in Monterey, Calif., to share their thoughts and feelings is touching and straightforward, reminiscent of Tuesdays with Morrie. Members of the titular club range from their 70s to 80s and are stirring representatives of honor, self-reliance, honest effort and commitment to ideals larger than themselves. What makes the book unusually affecting is that the men are imperfect, eccentric and sometimes prejudiced. There's vigor to Stein's characterizations and solid grace in his writing. The dominant protagonist is Stein's father-in-law, Moe, a former navy ensign, confrontational but loyal and generous. Boyd Huff, history professor and former prisoner of war in a Nazi camp, demonstrates "inextinguishable optimism" despite having a schizophrenic son and losing two other children. Yet there's no self-pity or whining, and war experiences are candidly recounted. The men's patriotism is dramatized when Stein tells of slight, skinny 19-year-old Harry Handler fighting in Okinawa and becoming a leader. Handler exemplifies a soldier who was patriotic, but didn't view himself as a hero, simply a man with "moral clarity" and a sense of responsibility to his country. On a more personal level, Stein addresses old age through Moe's terror of developing Alzheimer's and Cooper's potentially fatal cancer. The book, however, is never depressing. Attorney Stuart Walzer eloquently sums it up when he says young people look at his friends as "old men waiting to die... we're all gonna be old and waiting to die. It's just a matter of what you do with it." Photos.
