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The Book
The Magical Stranger
A Son's Journey into His Father's Profession
Commander Peter Rodrick was a Navy pilot — a man who spent much of his son's childhood at sea, flying off aircraft carriers. In 1979 his aircraft went down in the Indian Ocean, and he was gone. His son Stephen was thirteen.
More than thirty years later, Stephen Rodrick — by then a journalist — set out to understand the father he had barely known. He embedded with the strike fighter squadron his father had once commanded, following its sailors and aviators through training, deployment, and the demands of a life lived between home and the open ocean.
The Magical Stranger is the book that came out of that search: part memoir, part reported portrait of a Navy squadron, and a meditation on grief, fatherhood, and the families who wait ashore.
Inside the Book
What it's about
The title comes from the way a deployed father can become, to his children, a kind of magical stranger — present in photographs and phone calls, absent for months at a time, idealized and unknown in equal measure. Rodrick uses his own loss as a lens to look at a whole community: the pilots who fly demanding missions, the maintainers who keep the jets in the air, and the spouses and children who hold families together during long deployments.
Moving between past and present, the book braids the story of the author's childhood and his father's career with the lives of the squadron he follows decades later. It is a book about inheritance — what fathers pass to sons, what the Navy asks of its people, and what it costs to do dangerous work well.
Book Details
About this edition
A memoir of fathers, sons, and the sea
Discover the people behind the squadron and the family ashore.