Talk:Frank Sheed

Year of Death

Australian Dictionary of Biography [1] gives the death year as 1981, as does the Ignatius Press Author page [2] The article cited gives the same date but the year 1982. 103.19.11.131 (talk) 00:27, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sheed and Ward

This is really a piece that conflates Maisie Ward and Frank Sheed. If it remains this way, the title should be altered to reflect that it is about a couple and not just Frank himself. --Caspar Ignatius (talk) 00:02, 15 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

POV

foreshadowing "most of what was good about" Vatican II? Was anything good about Vatican II? Was anything bad about it? Oh yeah, that's a matter of opinion. Mk270 (talk) 03:41, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

His children remember him:

The children loved him and it seems that they saw through some of it. There are some examples of a child's pain in the book; but I don't have a copy handy.

Frank and Maisie: A Memoir With Parents Paperback – September 22, 1986 by Wilfrid sheed (Author)

(Found on Amazon) From Publishers Weekly "Frank and Maisie were . . . kings of the Catholic world from John O'Groats to Borneo . . . certainly in America they loomed enormous," writes their son in this arresting re-creation of what it was like to grow up with parents who were, among other things, founders of the "Tiffany of Catholic publishing," Sheed and Ward. Novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed describes his childhood in the Catholic literary establishment; we are treated to intimate, candid glimpses of the greats, for example, Ronald Knox, G. K. Chesterton and other classic apologists for the faith who were familiars in the peripatetic Sheeds' households. The marriage of Maisie, of the distinguished English Wards, and Frank, a galvanic Australian, produced not only children and a publishing house but stamped a Catholic intellectual formation that still bears fruit. Sheed's graceful, acerbic tribute to his unique parents is a rueful, loving appreciation of a father who remains "my editor, even in death" and of a mother who made "other people's conventional twentieth-century mothers seem awfully dull by comparison." Brimming with anecdotes, songs, hilarity and sadness, the memoir has resonance.

The Publishers Weekly blurb seems overwritten. Could it be a deliberate imitation of the dad's well known flamboyance?

In any case, the book and the blurb stand on their own as relevant sources for understanding these two persons and their unusual family.

Frankphilo (talk) 17:24, 2 November 2014 (UTC)Frankphilo[reply]