Fathers and Sons

Much as Nancy Friday's My Mother My Self explored the mother-daughter bond, this book illuminates the emotional themes that surround the important relationship betyween fathers and sons in terms both practical and theoretical, both enlightening and moving.

Drawing upon extensive case-history material, based on interviews with over 100 fathers and sons from a cross section of society, Yablonsky defines the various prototypes of each -- autocratic, egocentric, and distant fathers, compliant and rebellious sons; their interactions and interdependencies; their individual rights and duties and their obligations to each other ; the normal and pathological conflicts between them and how mothers and daughters can intervene constructively in such conflicts; the degree to which a father's status in the world can affect his son's aspirations -- and how a son's success or failure can affect his father; and other important dimensions of this complex relationship.

Fathers and Sons is an important, definitive, highly useful guide for all men who want to improve their own such relationships and for the women who want to better understand the fathers and sons in their lives.