"I'm working on a blog for Father's day." My husband looks at me as though he is afraid of where this is going. "Seeing as I can't wax poetic on what it's like to be a father, I figured I'd ask you." My husband responds by groaning out "why do this to me????" I think he's afraid to be a source for an opinion or a subject for the blog...Regardless, I push him for an answer and he says: "It's a lot like what you go through, only they say 'daddy'." He then wonders why the kids seem to go to him so often when asking for something. To which, I reply, "I don't know" which is generally the response I give the kids when they enquire with me about things before moving on to their father.
When I posed this question to my father, he started laughing. "It's having to do a lot of things you don't want to do." This was followed by examples of things like housing cats, dogs, and sometimes other people's children. He also made sure to mention the phrase "invasion of privacy"; I'm going to assume he was talking about my sister.
Essays inspired by Chabon's interactions with his four children and his own father, illuminate the meaning, magic, and mysteries of fatherhood.
A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, this book becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions on how to live. The narrator's relationship with his son leads to a powerful self-reckoning; the craft of motorcycle maintenance leads to an austerely beautiful process for reconciling science, religion, and humanism. Resonant with the confusions of existence, this classic is a touching and transcendent book of life.
Presents the story of a father and son's transformative shared journey in reading in the wake of the father's late-in-life enrollment in his son's undergraduate seminar, where the two engaged in debates over how to interpret Homer's classic masterpiece.
Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief, and about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page--and never without touches of rich, honest humor--Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father's death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he'd stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book--a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment--a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever--and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon
"Things My Son Needs to Know About the World collects the personal dispatches from the front lines of one of the most daunting experiences any man can experience: fatherhood. As he conveys his profound awe at experiencing all the "firsts" that fill him with wonder and catch him completely unprepared, Fredrik Backman doesn't shy away from revealing his own false steps and fatherly flaws, tackling issues both great and small, from masculinity and mid-life crises to practical jokes and poop. In between the sleep-deprived lows and wonderful highs, Backman takes a step back to share the true story of falling in love with a woman who is his complete opposite and learning to live a life that revolves around the people you care about unconditionally. Alternating between humorous side notes and longer essays; offering his son advice as he grows up and ventures out into the world, Backman relays the big and small lessons in life"-- Provided by publisher.
An anthology celebrating fathers and fatherhood--in the richly varied voices of daughters and sons, and of fathers and grandfathers themselves.
"Gathers more than a century of classic short stories about having, becoming, loving, and losing fathers"--Provided by publisher.
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.
"It's turtles all the way down when it comes to portraying parenthood in Paul Harding's novel Tinkers. The book opens with one father on his death bed, thinking about his relationship with his father. Then, as the narrative progresses, Harding flashes back to the dad's relationship with his dad. The result is a novel that, in just under 200 pages, captures generations of father/son dynamics and the complex ways we conform and rebel against our dads. Connecting it all is some incredible prose about family and growing up." -from 11 unforgettable books about fatherhood that totally get it right by MJ Franklin
"An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over twenty years, as she transforms from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner to sophisticated European transplant, daughter and father know each other only from their visits: four crucial visits over two decades, each in a different international city. The longer they are apart, the more their lives diverge, but also the more each comes to need the other's wisdom and, ultimately, rescue. Meanwhile, refugees of all nationalities are flowing into Europe under troubling conditions. Wanting to help, but also looking for a lost sense of home, our grown-up transplant finds herself quickly entranced by a world that is at once everything she has missed and nothing that she has ever known. Will her immersion in the lives of these new refugees allow her the grace to save her father?"--Amazon.com
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