Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
Title details for The Inventors by Peter Selgin - Available

The Inventors

A Memoir

by Peter Selgin
Lidia Yuknavitch
ebook
2 of 2 copies available
Borrow Read a sample Read a sample
2 of 2 copies available

In the Fall of 1970, at the start of eighth grade, Peter Selgin fell in love with the young teacher who'd arrived from Oxford wearing Frye boots, with long blond hair, and a passion for his students that was as intense as it was rebellious. The son of an emotionally remote inventor, Peter was also a twin competing for the attention and affection of his parents. He had a burning need to feel special.
The new teacher supplied that need. Together they spent hours in the teacher's carriage house, discussing books, playing chess, drinking tea, and wrestling. They were inseparable, until the teacher “resigned" from his job and left. Over the next ten years Peter and the teacher corresponded copiously and met occasionally, their last meeting ending in disaster. Only after the teacher died did Peter learn that he'd done all he could to evade his past, identifying himself first as an orphaned Rhodes Scholar, and later as a Native American.
As for Peter's father, the genius with the English accent who invented the first dollar-bill changing machine, he was the child of Italian Jews—something else Peter discovered only after his death. Paul Selgin and the teacher were both self-inventors, creatures of their own mythology, inscrutable men whose denials and deceptions betrayed the trust of the boy who looked up to them.
The Inventors is the story of a man's search for his father and a boy's passionate relationship with his teacher, of how these two enigmas shaped that boy's journey into manhood, filling him with a sense of his own unique destiny. It is a story of promises kept and broken as the author uncovers the truth—about both men, and about himself. For like them—like all of us—Peter Selgin, too, is his own inventor.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 16, 2016

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780989360487
      • File size: 23297 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780989360487
      • File size: 23297 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      February 1, 2016
      Selgin (Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist's Memoir, 2011, etc.) explores his relationships with two men who "had a profound influence" on him. As a twin, the author "had to share everything" with his brother, from birthdays and appearance to the love of their parents. They were also competitors and rivals. In this memoir, Selgin examines how their relationship combined with the influence of his father and his eighth-grade teacher to shape his own identity. The author's brother was "the person he looked up to more than...anyone else," his father was an iconoclastic inventor of electronic devices, and his English teacher was someone for whom he developed a long-lasting adolescent crush. Only after the deaths of his father and his teacher did Selgin discover that both had hidden key parts of their lives. At his father's funeral, he was stunned to be asked, "did you know your father was Jewish?" Later, quite by accident, Selgin discovered an obituary of his teacher and was astonished to learn of his Native American background. Family members told the author they either knew or suspected the truth about his father, and the teacher had taught him about art, music, and his dream of a place called "Castalia," "a special community where scholars, teachers, artists, people who still know how to think and dream, would come together." Through his writing and other artistic pursuits, Selgin began to share that dream. After his death, the teacher's dream had been brought to life in the form of an American Indian longhouse, while the uses of some of his father's electronic inventions caused him to reinvent his past. "It was strange," writes Selgin, "that the two men who had meant so much to you...both felt the need to break with their pasts and reinvent themselves." Though they buried their own pasts, their influences helped the author invent himself, and thrive, through his search for his own Castalia. A reflective investigation of the self, memory, and invention.

      COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from June 1, 2016

      Selgin focuses on his relationships with his father and an eighth-grade English teacher, uncovering not only what they hid from him and others but unraveling what people keep hidden from themselves. Selgin uses fablelike interludes to examine how we narrate our lives, how difficult it is to remember the past, and how blending fiction and nonfiction often leads to a more believable version of the truth. VERDICT A remarkable model of the art of the memoir, this book will satisfy all readers. [See Memoir, 3/15/16; ow.ly/v6cG300b8H9.]--DS

      Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Loading