My Grandfather's Book: Generations of an American Family

On Gary Gildner’s eleventh birthday, his Polish grandfather Steve Szostak was buried. Just before the undertaker closed the coffin, Gildner’s grandmother Nelly quietly placed the book she’d found her husband holding at his death in the casket. “Always this Korzeniowski—even on his last day—and why?” Nelly asked her grandson almost two decades later. It was in this moment—discovering his grandfather’s devotion to Joseph Conrad—that Gildner realized the man he had followed around on a norther...