A history of fatherhood, exploring its invention and transformation from the Bronze Age to the present through a collective portrait of emblematic fathers who have helped to define how the world should be ruled and what it means to be a man.
Wide-ranging ... Sedgewick’s book doesn’t offer a clear answer on what it means to be a father, but he offers a series of enlightening stories about how several famous figures have approached fatherhood. It’s a motley assortment of dads, ranging from Plato to Bob Dylan ... The profiles, at times, feel disjointed, but that doesn’t make the details Sedgewick unearths about how the approach to fatherhood changed over the years any less interesting ... Sedgewick’s book shouldn’t be viewed as a guide for fathers or families, but it is a timely read for a point where family roles continue to evolve and be challenged.
This superbly intelligent book isn’t, as I thought, a parenting guide. It’s a sweeping, savvy history of men’s notions of fatherhood, told through an entertaining series of mini-lives of eight famous males ... But one of the many revelations in this galloping overview of patriarchy across the ages is that men have been writing parenting manuals for millennia ... Rewarding ...
Again and again, with the lightest of touches, Sedgewick recasts these illustrious men as pioneers who discovered new, expansive sides of themselves as fathers ... Sedgewick is too elegant a historian to make an over-fine point of it, but it’s telling how often he reveals the 'Soft Daddy' in his parade of historical males.
I’m not sure Sedgewick’s book is really about fatherhood at all. It seems to me more a history of patriarchy, although maybe that’s not a word that sells books these days. It’s about how men came to be in charge, and how they came to stay in charge ... Sedgewick is, happily, an indefatigable researcher, who has unearthed many stories about these often terrible men, some of whose connections with fatherhood were at best peripheral.
