New York Times Reporter Shares "A Journal for Jordan"

From the New York Times Dana Canedy's powerful memoir, "A Journal for Jordan," begins by sounding similar notes. She has climbed from working-class roots, the daughter of an African-American military family at Fort Knox, Kentucky, into journalism's highest echelons: reporter for The New York Times and part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that created the 2001 series "How Race Is Lived in America." She dates the managing editor of The Boston Globe and vacations on Martha's Vineyard, enjoying lobster, single-malt Scotch and evenings of Scrabble.

But that relationship fades, and in its aftermath Canedy visits home. In her parents' living room in Radcliff, Kentucky, she encounters First Sergeant Charles Monroe King. A tall, handsome and heavily decorated soldier eight years her senior, he had served in Operation Desert Storm, Kuwait and Guantánamo Bay.

"I wondered how a man blessed with so much beauty could possibly be bashful," Canedy writes. But she also finds him stiff, old-fashioned and provincial. King is not a voracious reader of books and newspapers; he makes grammatical errors. Read more of this article>>

"From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By" by Dana Canedy

Dana Canedy Responds to Reader Questions