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Go Ask Your Father: One Man's Obsession with Finding His Origins Through DNA Testing

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Go Ask Your Father: One Man's Obsession with Finding His Origins Through DNA Testing

By: Lennard J. Davis  

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Average Customer Rating: 2.0 out of 5

Description:
Every family has a secret. But what if that secret makes you question your own place in the family? Mixing equal parts memoir, detective story, and popular-science narrative, this is the emotionally charged account of one man’s quest to find out the truth about his genetic heritage–and confront the agonizing possibility of having to redefine the first fifty years of his life.

Shortly before his father’s death, Lennard Davis received a cryptic call from his uncle Abie, who said he had a secret he wanted to tell him one day. When finally revealed, the secret–that Abie himself was Davis’s father, via donor insemination–seemed too preposterous to be true. Born in 1949, Davis wasn’t even sure that artificial insemination had existed at that time. Moreover, his uncle was mentally unstable, an unreliable witness to the past. Davis tried to erase the whole episode from his mind.

Yet it wouldn’t disappear. As a child, Davis had always felt oddly out of place in his family.  Could Abie’s story explain why? Over time Davis’s doubts grew into an obsession, until finally, some twenty years after Abie’s phone call, he launched an investigation–one that took him to DNA labs and online genealogical research sites, and into intense conversations with family members whose connection to him he had begun to doubt.  

At once an absorbing personal journey and a fascinating intellectual foray into the little-known history of artificial insemination and our millennia-long attempt to understand the mysteries of sexual reproduction, Davis’s quest challenges us to ask who we are beyond a mere collection of genes. And as the possibility of finding the truth comes tantalizingly within reach, with Davis facing the agonizing possibility of having to reenvision his early years and his relationships with those closest to him, his search turns into a moving meditation on the nature of family bonds, as well as a new understanding of the significance of the swarms of chemicals that are the blueprints for our very human selves.  

Publisher: Bantam

Release Date: 2009-05-19

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Can't recommend - This book has an interesting premise. At the funeral of the author's father, his uncle happens to mention that he is in fact the author's biological father (an early example of artificial insemination). Needless to say, whether this is in fact true will keep you reading - or make you jump to the end, like I did. ;^) Also on the plus side, the author has a very nice writing style.

On the minus side, I think this is another one of those books that would have made a much better magazine article. There's simply not enough here to pad it out to 200+ pages. Some of it's quite interesting - for example, the history of artificial insemination. Most of it, though, is not.

A lot of it rather obsessive (Davis is, in fact, the author of a book titled "Obession"). He comes from an interesting family, but it's not that interesting, at least to a casual observer. Now, if it had been a topic that others could relate to or at least find interesting (growing up in the 50s, being Jewish, having deaf parents, etc.), fine. There is just too much of one particular family and one particular author here however.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

"Was this protector my father? Was his potency enough to pluck the inchoate me from the chaos of the universe and brand me out for his own? Or was he an impotent man who knew that his sperm was weak, slow, and fallible. Was his shadowboxing [he liked to box along with the Friday night fights] a way to make him feel strong and to make me feel that he was the hypermasculine father that I seemed to need and that he seemed to want me to need? How would he have felt, then, if he has to ask his younger, more potent brother to stand in for him in the fertility arena, as my uncle claimed? Did it seem that the referee and the crowds were laughing at him while he lay helpless and on the floow, knocked down, the lights spinning around him with the confusion of the world itself [his father was an amateur boxer]? Or did he feel that if he feinted left and sailed out a powerful right punch when (and if) he tricked fate and got science and his brother to help him have a child? Was he the patsy or the con man? Did he win the match or was he the bleeding slumped thing on the canvas floor trying to regain consciousness and get to his feet as the referee counted in silent numbers the sum of his fate?"

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