Try free for 30 days

Preview

1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Access to thousands of additional audiobooks and Originals from the Plus Catalogue.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Lost in America

By: Sherwin B. Nuland
Narrated by: Sherwin B. Nuland
Try Premium Plus free

$16.45 per month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $26.99

Buy Now for $26.99

Pay using voucher balance (if applicable) then card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions Of Use and Privacy Notice and authorise Audible to charge your designated credit card or another available credit card on file.

Publisher's Summary

He walks with me through every day of my life, in that unsteady, faltering gait that so embarrassed me when I was a boy. Always, he is holding fast to the upper part of my right arm . . . As we make our way together, my father—I called him Daddy when I was small, because it sounded American and that is how he so desperately wanted things to seem—is speaking in the idiosyncratic rhythms of a self-constructed English.

So Sherwin Nuland introduces Meyer Nudelman, his father, a man whose presence continues to haunt Nuland to this day. Meyer Nudelman came to America from Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, when he was nineteen. Pursuing the immigrant’s dream of a better life but finding the opposite, he lived an endless round of frustration, despair, anger, and loss: overwhelmed by the premature deaths of his first son and wife; his oldest surviving son disabled by rheumatic fever in his teens; his youngest son, Sherwin, dutiful but defiant, caring for him as his life, beset by illness and fierce bitterness, wound to its unalterable end.

Lost in America, Nuland’s harrowing and empathetic account of his father’s life, is equally revealing about the author himself. We see what it cost him to admit the inextricable ties between father and son and to accept the burden of his father’s legacy.

In Lost in America, Sherwin Nuland has written a memoir at once timeless and universal.

©2003 Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland (P)2003 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic Reviews

“Lost in America is at once funny and heartbreaking, terrifying and lyrical, in its vivid evocation of growing up in a long-vanished immigrant Bronx. I think it is Nuland’s most powerful and beautiful book yet.”—Oliver Sacks, author of Uncle Tungsten

“Sherwin B. Nuland’s gift is for depicting both the splendors of vitalism and the terrors of entropy in the human. His compassionate but total portrait of his father’s suffering life evokes for me much that was my own father’s frustrations. In a way, Nuland has written a dark epilogue to Philip Roth’s Patrimony, one of the essential American books.”—Harold Bloom, author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Lost in America is a brutally honest book about a boy, his father, and the shared world they separately inhabit. It is gripping, utterly devoid of sentimentality, and disturbing to read. Yet from the bleakness of his childhood, Sherwin Nuland has written a beautiful memoir of psychological survival and the complexities of love, an unsparing look at shame, defiance, beholdenness, and the saving grace of the American dream. It is a powerful and important book, and deeply moving.”—Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind

What listeners say about Lost in America

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.