FATHERHOOD

From here to paternity.

Sedgewick, the author of a history of coffee, scrutinizes the lives of thinkers, writers, and leaders in an effort to understand how fatherhood and paternalism have changed over time. This is a sharp yet limited book, focused almost exclusively “on Western culture because,” for the past several thousand years, “the West has been the world’s dominant patriarchal tradition.” Mainly, Sedgewick’s subjects “could now be described—though not simply or without ambivalence—as white dads.” While some readers will consider this approach a nonstarter, the author is an undeniably talented prose stylist with estimable dot-connecting abilities. His throughline comes into view in the second chapter, which contrasts ideas held by his first chapter’s subjects—ancient Greek philosophers—with those of Saint Augustine, whose framing of fatherhood is still important in Christianity: “As Augustine conceived it, Original Sin is a patrilineal legacy of evil—a vision radically opposed to Aristotle’s idea that fathers were the origin of good.” Augustine’s “paternalistic logic” also stoked the Catholic church’s epoch-shaping “call for salvation by force.” Centuries later, Thomas Jefferson “manipulated fatherhood” for “personal and political” reasons, infamously declining to acknowledge that he had fathered children with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, and, in a lesser-known act, labeling indigenous Americans “children” who should emulate white families. Likewise, racialized paternalism influenced outspoken abolitionist Henry David Thoreau’s self-serving views on his family’s pencil-making business, which relied on trees felled by enslaved people. For his part, Bob Dylan, who had a difficult relationship with his father, wrote songs that foregrounded “the emotional turmoil of the postwar white family” but said he sought a wife “who can cook and sew.” Though constrained in its focus, this book engages in interesting ways with assumptions about fathers of nations, faiths, and families.

An intelligent but circumscribed look at what it means to be a father.