Two things need correcting on this page. The book is Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir, and it was written by John McCain with Mark Salter. Salter worked on McCain’s staff for nearly twenty years and co wrote several of his books. He was left off this page entirely, which is a disservice to the man who did much of the writing.
Second, and more important: despite the title, this is not a book about religious faith. The faith in question is fidelity. Loyalty to a code, to a service, and to a family that had produced admirals for two generations. Readers who buy it expecting Christian devotional content will be surprised. It belongs on a shelf about duty and fatherhood, not on one about discipleship.
What the book is
Three generations of Navy men. McCain’s grandfather was a four star admiral who commanded a carrier force in the Pacific in the Second World War. His father was also a four star admiral and commanded all United States forces in the Pacific during Vietnam. John McCain III became a naval aviator, was shot down over Hanoi in 1967, and was held as a prisoner of war for five and a half years.
The central episode is this. The North Vietnamese worked out whose son he was and offered him early release, which would have been a propaganda victory and would have broken the code that prisoners go home in the order they were captured. He refused. He stayed, and the treatment got worse.
The book is his attempt to explain where the capacity to make that decision came from. His answer is that it was handed to him, by a father and a grandfather he mostly admired from a distance and often did not much like.
Why it is worth a father’s time
McCain is unusually honest about being a mediocre and rebellious young man. He was near the bottom of his class at Annapolis. He was reckless. He did not earn the character that carried him through Hanoi; he inherited a standard and eventually decided to live up to it.
That is the part worth sitting with. What passed down was not warmth or a close relationship. It was an expectation, largely unspoken, about what a man in this family does when it costs him. A father can be absent for most of a childhood and still transmit something durable, and a father can be present constantly and transmit nothing. This book is a long case study in the first.
The honest caveats
It is a political memoir by a sitting senator, published in 1999 as he prepared to run for president. Read it with that in mind. He is candid about his failings, but he is also constructing a public account of himself.
McCain died in August 2018. Whatever a reader thinks of his politics, and people think very different things, the Hanoi chapters stand on their own.
Who it is for
Fathers thinking about what actually transfers to a son. Men who like military history. Anyone interested in how character holds up under real pressure rather than hypothetical pressure.
It has no study questions and no application section. It is a memoir. The conversation it starts is the point.
Bottom line
A powerful book about inherited duty, honestly told, and not the book its title suggests to a Christian browsing a shelf. Worth reading for what it actually is.
Find Faith of My Fathers on Amazon.