[In "Half Remembered" Peter Davison] has written a personal history indeed. The stern candor of it makes one wonder at first if he is to be linked with the confessional writers—the Robert Lowells, Sylvia Plaths—who have walked naked before us these years in bitter anger and resentment, accusing and hating their fathers, finding life worth revealing only in its guilts and humiliations, its appalling failures. But of Peter Davison this is far from true. If his search is, like theirs, a search for identity, unlike them he has escaped self-pity; he has made the impossibly difficult journey from resentment to compassion. And he has found himself….

The tale is a familiar one, of course, as all personal histories are familiar. The remarkable impact of Peter Davison's tale lies in the telling—in the depth of recognition, for one thing, that a person can never escape by...