Books about Fatherhood
In honor of Father’s Day, we have compiled a list of books about our relationships with our dads! All books are grouped for adults, teens, and children, and can be borrowed from the Roslindale Library.
Adults
Fatherhood: Poems about Fathers
A celebration of fathers and fatherhood, this one-of-a-kind anthology features the richly varied voices of daughters and sons, and of fathers and grandfathers themselves.
Dad Rules: Notes on Fatherhood, the World’s Best Job
By Michael Milligan
Let Dad Rules act as your personal GPS. With humor and insight, it will guide you from that life-altering moment when your wife says, “Honey, we need to talk,” all the way through pregnancy and birthing classes, the birthing process itself, infancy and toddlerhood, adolescence, and, finally, the day eighteen years later when your little bundle of joy leaves the nest (possibly to return shortly after, jobless and in desperate need of a haircut).
Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro: Expert Advice, Guidance, and Insight From A Pediatrician-dad
By David Hill
A pediatrician relates practical advice for fathers about child rearing, covering such topics as infant and child development, everyday illnesses, vaccines, and potty training.
Keys To Becoming A Father
By Willian Sears
In recent decades, young fathers have begun playing a larger parenting role than ever, doing things that fathers of a few generations ago believed to be “mother’s duties”. Here is a doctor’s advice to men on all aspects of fatherhood, from assisting at childbirth through sharing routine child-care functions with mom.
Dating for Dads: The Single Father’s Guide to Dating Well Without Parenting Poorly
By Ellie Slout Fisher
Here is the first book written specifically for men who date while answering to a higher authority: their children. As a single father, you’re ready to begin dating again. But are your kids ready? In this much-needed guide, relationship expert Ellie Slott Fisher comes to the rescue with no-nonsense, no-judgments advice on everything from how to ask a woman out to navigating the potential minefield of overnight dates.
Teens/Young Adults
Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
By Barack Obama
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father, a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey, first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
Jefferson’s Sons: A Founding Father’s Secret Children
By Kimberley Bradley
A fictionalized look at the last twenty years of Thomas Jefferson’s life at Monticello through the eyes of three of his slaves, two of whom were his sons by his slave Sally Hemings.
The Year We Disappeared: A Father-daughter Memoir
By Clin Busby
Cylin and John Busby share the challenges they faced after their family was forced into hiding to protect themselves from a killer who had already shot John, a police officer, and was determined to finish the job.
An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us
By James Carroll
An American Requiem is the story of one man’s coming of age. But more than that, it is a coming to terms with the conflicts that disrupted many families, inflicting personal wounds that were also social, political, and religious. Carroll grew up in a Catholic family that seemed blessed. His father had abandoned his own dream of becoming a priest to rise through the ranks of Hoover’s FBI and then become one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, the founder of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Young Jim livedthe privileged life of a general’s son, dating the daughter of a vice president and meeting the pope, all in the shadow of nuclear war, waiting for the red telephone to ring in his parents’ house. He worshiped his father until Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement, turmoil in the Catholic Church, and then Vietnam combined to outweigh the bond between father and son. These were issues on which they would never agree. Only after Carroll left the priesthood to become a writer and husband with children of his own did he come to understand fully the struggles his father had faced. In this work of nonfiction, the best-selling novelist draws on the skills he honed with nine much-admired novels to tell the story he was, literally, born to tell. An American Requiem is a benediction on his father’s life, his family’s struggles, and the legacies of an entire generation.
Children
Do I Have A Daddy? A Story About A Single-parent Child With A Special Section for Single Mothers and Fathers
By Jeanne Warren Lindsey
A single mother explains to her son that his daddy left soon after he was born. Includes a section with suggestions for answering the question, “Do I have a daddy?”
A Father’s Day Thank You
By Janet Nolan
Harvey the bear searches for the perfect Father’s Day present and decides that thanking his dad is the best gift of all.
The Barefoot Book of Father & Daughter Tales
By Josephine Evetts-Secker
A collection of folktales from various cultures illuminates the father-daughter relationship.
In Daddy’s Arms, I Am Tall: African Americans Celebrating Fathers
A collection of poems celebrating African-American fathers by Angela Johnson, E. Ethelbert Miller, Carole Boston Weatherford, and others.
Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers: A Collection of Family Poems
By Mary Ann Hoberman
Humorous and serious poems celebrate every kind of family member, including aunts and uncles, step-brothers and sisters, cousins, and even cats!
A Father Like That
By Charlotte Zolotow
A young boy shares with his mother his daydreams about the father who left before he was born.
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