Böcker av Justine Davis Randers-Pehrson

This novel is concerned with the problem of honesty in personal relationships, in political life, and in the church. Most of the events described occur in Washington D.C. during the Depression and in the pre-war Thirties.Some of the characters struggle to sustain their personal integrity. One disastrously manages life by allowing fantasy to prevail. Another makes a living by means of innuendo and slander. Some by nature are evasive and self-deceiving, while one individual is honest through and through and knows no other way.The book offers snapshot views of Washington life (for example, a White House reception, the celebration of the transatlantic flight of Lindbergh) and takes the reader to a hearing of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

The author had a varied view of the shifting world during nine decades of the Twentieth Century. Her conventional life as an Army daughter ended abruptly in 1922 when her father died. She lived in Washington DC with her widowed mother, with the exception of years at college in the US and abroad. Her professional life as a staff member at the Library of Congress ended when an irregular relationship evolved into pregnancy. She and the child and the child's father joined forces in southern Maryland, on an abandoned farm where all their neighbors were black. During the following 17 years, the author was the family breadwinner, with three children, a situation that at one time led the family to near destitution. She recovered, and gradually moved up the Civil Service career ladder to positions of responsibility, at last as a translator for the US Patent Office. In subsequent years, she became interested in ancient history and traveled extensively, gathering material for a book on the Later Roman Empire. Other historical works followed, as well as historical novels. In her varied career, the author gained insights into the difficulties of uneducated single mothers, and of rural blacks. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement, going to Mississippi during the "Freedom Summer" as a member of a biracial team. For My Father offers thumbnail sketches of a variety of public figures, all the way from Buffalo Bill to Alfred North Whitehead, Norman Thomas, Walter Reuther, and Jesse Jackson.

Colonel Erbe's daughters have different views of woman's place in the world. The eldest, Dickey, is a confirmed feminist. Her younger sister, Petra, is employed as a cartographer in the US Land Office, rather against her will. She refuses to regard herself as a "career woman." The youngest of the trio, Agatha, is widowed in the first year of her marriage and returns to Washington from a western Army garrison, facing the need to support herself although she has no special training. Much of the story is seen through the eyes of Kurt Steiner, a veteran of the failed revolution in Germany (1848) and of the Union Army. As a friend of Colonel Erbe, and chief of the Land Office cartographic section, he tries to help the young women and becomes entangled in their lives. He features prominently in the consciousness of all three sisters.