At eighty-eight, David Jacobson sits down to do what most of us put off forever: gather every scattered piece of a life and lay them out where they can finally be seen.

He was born in San Francisco in 1937 to two alcoholics who could not stop drinking long enough to keep him safe. By the time he was a boy, he had survived polio in a county hospital ward, stretches inside institutions that swallowed children like him, and the daily, grinding work of raising himself in a house where the adults had already given up. He thought, more than once, about not making it to adulthood.

He made it anyway.

Putting the Pieces Together is the memoir of that survival and everything that came after it, the Air Force years, an African adventure, an unlikely Cold War friendship with Russians, the University of New Mexico, marriage to Glenda (his partner now for sixty-seven years), two children, a career on the early frontier of computing, brothers lost and remembered, a quiet retirement spent making digital art and crossing the country in an RV, and the long, surprising stretch of joyful years in Sun City, Texas that he calls the best of his life.

Told in fifteen "pieces" and illustrated with the author's own original digital artwork, this is a book about the slow arithmetic of a life, how the worst beginning does not have to be the whole story, how strangers and friends quietly save us, and how a person who once counted the days until he could escape his own childhood can look back at eighty-eight and call the picture good.

For readers of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, and Tara Westover's Educated, memoirs of children who grew up inside their parents' addictions and chaos and walked out the other side with something to say. For anyone who has ever wondered whether the early pieces of their life can still be assembled into something whole.

They can. This book is the proof.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

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**Please note our transit times are from the date of dispatch.** We first started out as ?The Paperback Exchange,? a chain of physical bookstores where we would part exchange your beloved books for new stories to transport you to faraway places. However, as shopping started to evolve to online shops and marketplaces, we bid our stores goodbye to become ?PBShop.? This transition has only allowed us to blossom as we now ship thousands of titles to book lovers across the globe. We pride ourselves in being a community of local book lovers which allows our passion and devotion to shine in everything we do. In 2020 we not only celebrated our 20th birthday but our 1st birthday as being completely employee owned after becoming an E.O.T in September 2019. We are proud to be different and embrace standing apart on a book mountain by working from a virtual inventory which allows us to provide thousands of books that may be difficult to get for your bookshelf or your studies. Working with a number of different suppliers allows us to explore other avenues such as puzzles, sheet music and even stationery so we really do have something for everyone. Life is about being versatile in all realms of existence. If this is your first purchase with us, or you are a returning customer, we would like to welcome you to the PBShop family, for there is no friend as loyal as a book. We are a company who put our customers at the centre of everything we do as we understand the importance of reading because once you learn to read, you will forever be free. There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours that we are yet to explore, which is why we will forever inspire curious minds.

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