"In every one of . . . [novelist Pat] Conroy's big, story-driven Southern books, there has been a father, a son and a holy ghost in the form of an ineffable secret," wrote Tracy Cochran of Publishers Weekly. Conroy has made a cottage industry of rendering his family in seven novels and nonfiction works, tracing the arc of his life from army brat to Citadel recruit to teacher and on to survivor of childhood badgering if not outright physical abuse. Best-selling author Conroy has worked some of his bitterest experiences into stories that present ironic and often jarring but still humorous views of life and relationships in the contemporary South. Garry Abrams in the Los Angeles Times reported that "misfortune has been good to novelist Pat Conroy. It gave him a family of disciplinarians, misfits, eccentrics, liars and loudmouths. It gave him a Southern childhood in which the bizarre...