Fields of Light: A Son Remembers His Heroic Father - Paperback

by Joseph Hurka (Author)

Winner of the Pushcart Editors' Book Award. Publishers Weekly starred review. Anniversary Edition. Sixteen photographs. In 1993, Joseph Hurka traveled to Prague to walk in the footsteps of his father, a Czech resistance fighter and American spy. The result, FIELDS OF LIGHT: A SON REMEMBERS HIS HEROIC FATHER, won the Pushcart Editors' Book Award (nominated by Andre Dubus), and is now reissued in an anniversary paperback edition. As the son walks through history, he learns that his father, Josef, came of age fighting the Nazis, and later worked in the Underground against the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. He describes in detail--here for the first time--the rescue of the great Czech statesman Dr. Josef Macek and his wife, Bela, on one dangerous night in December, 1949. FIELDS OF LIGHT is also a story of modern Prague and the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Hurka takes us with him into the heart of Prague, to Prague Castle--home of ancient kings--and into the "Old Town," where Kafka lived and Mozart once performed. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, in giving the book a starred review, has called the book "gripping." BOOKLIST writes, "It's the story of a man who fought for democracy and...the moving account of a son who finally comes to know his father."

Author Biography

Joseph Hurka earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has published his fiction in numerous literary quarterlies. His first book, the memoir, FIELDS OF LIGHT: A SON REMEMBERS HIS HEROIC FATHER, won the Pushcart Editors' Book Award, and a subsequent novel, BEFORE, was published in 2007 to critical acclaim. Hurka currently teaches writing at Tufts University, where he is a Phi Beta Kappa Poet, and in the graduate program at Emerson College. He lives in southern New Hampshire.