WHERE’S DAD?

A Christian-oriented book about the key role that fathers play in families.

In this comprehensive debut work, Combs promises readers “a common-sense approach to developing a character for success, understanding Biblical principles, re-establishing moral values, and building relationships.” He specifically aims to build the characters of fathers, whose increasing absence from the American family unit deeply concerns him. A father, he says, is in many ways the key to the stability of the family unit, so in these pages, he provides a series of moral instructions for prospective husbands and dads. He also offers a clearly written guide to more practical aspects of life, such as how to talk to potential employers, fill out job applications, manage credit cards, and balance one’s personal income. The book clearly lays out each of these pragmatic lessons, and many more, and effectively illustrates them with specific examples. They all revolve around Combs’ implicit contention that in order to be a responsible adult, a man must cultivate a small but crucial group of real-world skills. Overall, this self-help work couches its instructions in insistently conservative Christian terms that refer repeatedly to “Biblical principles and morals” and call the Bible “the perfect manual for living a good and just life”; this will accord nicely with the beliefs of its target audience, who may find its tone of moral clarity appealing. However, the book also includes the erroneous implication that the United States’ Founding Fathers intended their new nation to be Christian. Far more troubling, though, are its instructions to young women not to dress or act “suggestively” and to avoid crowds because a ratio of “two or more boys per girl” could lead to “male aggression.” These and other passages give the book the curious feel of a work written in another era.

A call to duty and instruction manual that will appeal only to deeply conservative husbands and fathers.