Praise for Fatherless Sons "Research shows that most men now are better fathers than their own fathers were to them. A generation of men are 'making it up,' giving to their children more than they received. No one describes the poignancy--and hope--of contemporary fatherhood better than Jonathan Diamond's heartfelt and insightful new book. For every man who had a father--and who wants to be one." --Terrence Real, author of I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression and How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women "Diamond's moving account of his relationship with his father is a nuanced exploration of mourning and its aftermath." --Publishers Weekly "This is a powerful and beautiful book, written with warmth, humor, and generosity of spirit. Fatherless Sons guides us through the complex journey of grief, helping to transform pain and anguish into hope and healing." --Dr. Dusty Miller, author of Your Surviving Spirit and Women Who Hurt Themselves

Is it really possible to succeed in life despite the damaging effects of fatherlessness?Steve Saucer, founder and pastor of Restoration Church of Jesus Christ shares an intimate view of his life's journey, from youth to adulthood, offering honest insight from the heart of a fatherless son.If you're searching for concrete answers, get comfortable and get ready! You'll find The Fatherless Son to be a textbook, a handbook and a guidebook to anyone struggling to make sense of their "now" in the context of their past.Prepare to dive deep and begin healing!

The impact of absent fathers on sons in the black community has been a subject for cultural critics and sociologists who often deal in anonymous data. Yet many of those sons have themselves addressed the issue in autobiographical works that form the core of African American literature. A Fatherless Child examines the impact of fatherlessness on racial and gender identity formation as seen in black men’s autobiographies and in other constructions of black fatherhood in fiction. Through these works, Tara T. Green investigates what comes of abandonment by a father and loss of a role model by probing a son’s understanding of his father’s struggles to define himself and the role of community in forming the son’s quest for self-definition in his father’s absence. Closely examining four works—Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father—Green portrays the intersecting experiences of generations of black men during the twentieth century both before and after the Civil Rights movement. These four men recall feeling the pressure and responsibility of caring for their mothers, resisting public displays of care, and desiring a loving, noncontentious relationship with their fathers. Feeling vulnerable to forces they may have identified as detrimental to their status as black men, they use autobiography as a tool for healing, a way to confront that vulnerability and to claim a lost power associated with their lost fathers. Through her analysis, Green emphasizes the role of community as a father-substitute in producing successful black men, the impact of fatherlessness on self-perceptions and relationships with women, and black men’s engagement with healing the pain of abandonment. She also looks at why these four men visited Africa to reclaim a cultural history and identity, showing how each developed a clearer understanding of himself as an American man of African descent. A Fatherless Child conveys important lessons relevant to current debates regarding the status of African American families in the twenty-first century. By showing us four black men of different eras, Green asks readers to consider how much any child can heal from fatherlessness to construct a positive self-image—and shows that, contrary to popular perceptions, fatherlessness need not lead to certain failure.

Fatherless Sons is a poignant collection of stories told by a group of men who grew up without fathers in their lives. They all have a different story, but the theme is the same-a boy without a father. You will learn how each of these men, who were hurt badly by the absence of fathers in their lives, learned to grow into the men they are today. As their stories are all different, so are the outcomes. Some of them were successful and some were not. The moral of this story is that no child should ever be deprived of having both parents in his/her life. But both parents have to be the best parent they can be to their children. Every child deserves the best. Demetrius Zeigler, the composer of this book, is a fatherless son himself. Through his desire to bring his story to others in the same situation, he has found a way to forgive his own father for not being there in his life, and he has realized that the people who remained there for him are truly the people who are worth his love and gratitude - or they made his fatherless life complete!

Drawing from culture, stories, and his own personal experience, John Sowers presents the desperate reality of fatherlessness in his generation. Fatherless Generation is a hard-hitting, descriptive look at this issue, showing how awareness, compassion, and mentoring are the keys to writing new stories of hope.

One man shares his story of growing up fatherless, the lessons it taught him, and how sons and parents can combat its side effects. Searching for Dad steps inside the mind, heart, and soul of a boy without a father. Recognizing the power of the emotional and psychological side effects of growing up fatherless will help absentee fathers, single mothers, and sons who survived a fatherless childhood understand and cope. Byron Ricks shares his story about the challenges he faced, the lessons he learned, and the man he became. He writes for fathers who do not realize the full impact their absence can have, for mothers wanting to do the best for their sons but are not sure what that is, and for men who feel empty and unattached and are not sure why. Ultimately, Searching for Dad is a book of hope, filled with illustrations about nine side effects and how fathers, mothers, and sons can forestall, minimize and even reverse them. Growing up fatherless may be the condition; healing is the possibility.

The perfect gift for parents this Father’s Day: a beautiful, gut-wrenching memoir of Irish identity, fatherhood, and what we owe to the past. “A heartbreaking and redemptive book, written with courage and grace.” –J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy “…a lovely little book.” –Ross Douthat, The New York Times The child of an Irish man and an Irish-American woman who split up before he was born, Michael Brendan Dougherty grew up with an acute sense of absence. He was raised in New Jersey by his hard-working single mother, who gave him a passion for Ireland, the land of her roots and the home of Michael's father. She put him to bed using little phrases in the Irish language, sang traditional songs, and filled their home with a romantic vision of a homeland over the horizon. Every few years, his father returned from Dublin for a visit, but those encounters were never long enough. Devastated by his father's departures, Michael eventually consoled himself by believing that fatherhood was best understood as a check in the mail. Wearied by the Irish kitsch of the 1990s, he began to reject his mother's Irish nationalism as a romantic myth. Years later, when Michael found out that he would soon be a father himself, he could no longer afford to be jaded; he would need to tell his daughter who she is and where she comes from. He immediately re-immersed himself in the biographies of firebrands like Patrick Pearse and studied the Irish language. And he decided to reconnect with the man who had left him behind, and the nation just over the horizon. He began writing letters to his father about what he remembered, missed, and longed for. Those letters would become this book. Along the way, Michael realized that his longings were shared by many Americans of every ethnicity and background. So many of us these days lack a clear sense of our cultural origins or even a vocabulary for expressing this lack--so we avoid talking about our roots altogether. As a result, the traditional sense of pride has started to feel foreign and dangerous; we've become great consumers of cultural kitsch, but useless conservators of our true history. In these deeply felt and fascinating letters, Dougherty goes beyond his family's story to share a fascinating meditation on the meaning of identity in America.

The story is about a young man (myself) who grew up in a small village, raised by a single mother who had to endure a lot of stress, trials and tribulation. In the midst of all the stresses and the going up and down of life, with two kids to raise, with a condition of High Blood pressure, sugar diabetes, she fought to keep her kids happy and in the process made them stronger, although it was hard for them, they had to grow up quickly and in the process giving up a lot of privileges. Today they are all grown, even though they still experience the pain and the hurt they had to go through, they do understand that other things have a reason why they happen, they know that if they hadnt gone through other things, life wouldnt be the same for them.

A compelling and controversial exploration of absentee fathers and their impact on the nation.