Fatherhood
A History of Love and Power
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- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
An Economist, GQ and Times Book of the Year 2025
An ambitious history of masculinity and family, from the Bronze Age to the modern day, Fatherhood dares to offer a more caring and affirmative vision of the roles men currently play in society.
'Superbly intelligent . . . a rewarding Sapiens-style big history' - The Sunday Times
'A lightness of touch that recalls Bill Bryson or Craig Brown at their non-fiction best' - The Observer
What is fatherhood, and where did it come from? How has the role of men in families and society changed across thousands of years? What does the history of fatherhood reveal about what it means to be a dad today?
From the anxious philosophers of ancient Athens and Henry VIII’s obsessive quest for an heir, to Charles Darwin’s theories of human origins, Bob Dylan’s take down of ‘The Man’, and beyond, Sedgewick shows how successive generations of men have shaped our understanding of what it means to be and have a father, and in turn our ideas of who we are, where we come from and what we are capable of.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fathers' role in upholding the social order and their struggles with unruly sons are probed in this winsome and erudite study of patriarchy. CUNY historian Sedgwick (Coffeeland) offers biographical sketches of famous dads and their children, from an ancient Sumerian named Shuruppag, who wrote a querulous, plaintive advice-tablet to his son—"The instructions of an old man are precious: you should comply with them!"—to Bob Dylan, who stoked rebellion in young people yet himself became, Sedgwick notes, a doting, apolitical paterfamilias rather like his own middle-class father. Along the way Sedgwick explores Aristotle's belief that the state rested on a foundation of fathers ruling over households, Thoreau's longing to escape from his father's Massachusetts pencil factory, and Charles Darwin's rapt study of his 10 children for insights on how they inherited traits from him. Sedgwick teases out the contradictions between patriarchy as a doctrine of benevolent control and its reality as a form of constraint and domination that often breeds resistance. He plays on these ironies in elegant, evocative prose, as in his analysis of Sigmund Freud's Oedipal complex ("From a child's perspective, Sigmund Freud's theories made it natural, even healthy, to despise your father. From a father's perspective, Freud made it normal, even good, to be hated"). It's a fresh and insightful meditation on the paternal dilemma.
