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I remember the early years of my childhood as a happy time spent in the larger-than-life presence of my father. Dad was a television repairman who worked and played equally hard. But he died abruptly of a massive heart attack at 33 when I was only 10 years old. His death left me depressed and in utter despair.

Fortunately, among the many gifts my father bestowed on me was a passion for reading, and it was in books that I found some measure of solace. A little more than a year after Dad’s death, one book in particular became the…

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