From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author: a beautifully crafted memoir of his lifelong chase after his father's shadow.

John was eleven months old when his father, Barney Darnton, a war correspondent for The New York Times, was killed in World War II, but his absence left a more profound imprint on the family than any living father could have had. John's mother - a well-known Times reporter and editor - tried to keep alive the dream of raising her two sons in ideal surroundings. When that proved impossible, she collapsed emotionally and physically, financially destitute and too hungover to get out of bed most days. But along the way she created a myth of the father that John took as his own, following his father's footsteps into the same newsroom. Decades after his father's death, John and his brother, the historian Robert Darnton, began delving into the past to uncover secrets about their parents. The Barney they uncover is radically different from the man they imagined: a hero who gave his life for his family, his country, and the fourth estate.

Intensely moving and vividly descriptive of America from the Jazz Age to the present, Almost a Family describes a family in which love and devotion were built on an often dazzling framework of deception.